EP 236: Sasheen Artis

EP 236 Sasheen Artis

Julie Harris Oliver: [00:00:00] Hi friends, you're listening to the other 50 percent of Herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. This is the show where we talk to women and historically marginalized people and share their success and strategy in the entertainment industry. We also talk to people who are doing the work of creating more opportunity and making things better in the business.

And sometimes we talk to people who are doing both. Today is one of those days. Today I got to speak with two time Emmy winning producer, Sasheen Artis, who is the Founder/ CEO of Plenty of Pie, a talent incubator and production accelerator offering leadership development, practical producer skill training, and mentorship to emerging and mid career creatives of color.

Sasheen has worked with such newsmakers as President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and director Jonathan Demme. Her latest film, Birthing Justice, addressing black maternal health outcomes, screened for 200 countries at the United Nations and as part of a continuing education course for the American Medical [00:01:00] Association. It currently airs on PBS and you should go watch it.

She got her start at Paramount Home Entertainment, working on blockbuster marketing campaigns for Titanic. Mission Impossible, Braveheart, and TV series like Star Trek, The Next Generation, and Nickelodeon's Rugrats. She's a member of the Television Academy, the Producers Guild, and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc.

Sasheen is originally from Harlem, New York, and earned her B. A. in Psychology from Stanford University. We talked about all the things she's working on and shared our unpopular opinions about the color purple. You can find us online at TheOther50Percent. com, all spelled out in letters, as well as on all the podcast places.

And you can find links to everything I'm up to on the link tree that is in the show notes and at JulieHarrisOliver. com. Here, have a listen. Sasheen Artis, welcome back to The Other 50 Percent.

Sasheen Artis: Thank you so much for having me, Julie. It's been amazing to see you blossom and grow, and I'm so glad to be back.[00:02:00]

Julie Harris Oliver: It's so nice to have you. I remember we talked in 2018, episode 132, if you're following along at home, you want to go look it up in here. Sasheen's amazing life story, which You won't believe. So go listen to that. We won't dig into it all again. We'll make people go back and listen to 132. It's probably on the website.

I don't know if it's on Apple Podcasts anymore, but it'll be on the website and I'll link to it in the show notes. So I know you've been up to so many things, so I definitely want to catch up. It's been, is that six years since we talked? 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23,

Sasheen Artis: 24. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's been, it's, you know, it's everything pre COVID.

It's sort of like a whole century ago.

Julie Harris Oliver: It's like a whole lifetime. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. And what is time? So what have you been up to?

Sasheen Artis: Oh my goodness. So let's see in 2018. Last we spoke, I don't know if I had just come back from Jordan or if I was heading to Jordan. I think you were headed there.

So it was an amazing trip. [00:03:00] I had been invited by Her Royal Highness Princess Ramali to, and the Royal Film Commission to do a workshop there with their creatives. And it was brilliant. So they, you know, we, I created this. Curriculum. And it was eight spectacular Jordanian, uh, Syrian, Palestinian, just a whole host of beautiful, beautiful stories and creatives that wanted to understand the Hollywood system, understand pitching and all the things.

And so I had an opportunity. I had another PGA member with me producers Guild of America. Her name was Rachel Watanabe Batten. She's an Emmy award winning producer. She came with me. She's based in New York. And so we, you know, she flew out of New York. I flew out of LA. We met there and it was just a spectacular, like 10 days.

It was just brilliant. Incredible. May 18 was 2018. And then 2019, I actually worked on a show [00:04:00] called lost LA. and that was a docuseries for, for KCET. And that was really cool. It's all things, Los Angeles, these hidden gems, you know, go while going through different archives all across the, the SoCal area on that show.

I produced six episodes. With them and won two Emmys and it was crazy because I won, you know, during COVID. So I literally, you know, was sitting on the edge of my bed in some sweats, drinking some tea. You didn't get to go to the party? No parties, no paparazzi, nothing. It was just like, oh, okay. So I did get the Emmy though, which was great.

Amazing. Yeah, so that was fun. And then in 2022. I had the opportunity to work on a documentary, a feature length doc called Birthing Justice. And that, it's on Black maternal health outcomes and the solutions that are working across the country. We went to several different locations, [00:05:00] Augusta, Georgia, D. C.,

the Boothill of Missouri, as well as St. Louis, as well as Los Angeles. And we, you know, traveled around and found these amazing women, women who had complications with their pregnancy, but overcame them, with, you know, the, the care and, and, medical treatment that they needed. And understanding that, you know, when you provide those services, to women and whether it, you know, it didn't matter whether they were poor or wealthy, upper middle class, lower middle class did not matter.

They, they had these opportunities to get care. And that care saved their lives, saved the lives of their babies. And it's currently, Birthing Justice is currently airing on PBS. It's still there on the pbs. org platform. it's, it's really aspirational. It's very hopeful. It's not depressing at all. So please, you know, people can go check it out and be uplifted.[00:06:00]

one thing that was great about the documentary. Is that, the American Medical Association, picked it up as a continuing education course. So now medical professionals, if they need to get a unit, cause a lot of times you have to, you know, even though you have, you have your, your, your MD and you're working, you still need to get a continuing education credits.

They can, take that course, watch the film, and then they can incorporate those practices into their own medical practice. Because I was going to

Julie Harris Oliver: say, if Serena Williams can't get competent maternity care

Sasheen Artis: Exactly. Exactly. Serena, Beyonce, one of our, executive producers, Alison Felix, she's an Olympian, you know, she has like 11 medals. Probably the healthiest woman in the world. And she, you know, had eclampsia and it was one of those things where it was life or death. And, you know, she had to, deliver her, her daughter [00:07:00] prematurely. and she goes into this all, you know, in the, in the documentary, you know, how scary it was. And she didn't have.

you know, any understanding of what was going on or that she would be even prone to it. So, you know, a lot of times doctors have to take a little bit more care with their, black female patients and make sure that, you know, they're monitoring their, their high blood pressure and all those things. So, It's a, it's a great, documentary to learn from and to be uplifted by.

Julie Harris Oliver: Wonderful. It's so important. I'm so glad that you have done that. Can we talk a little bit about the diversity initiative at the producers guild of America power of diversity master workshop?

Sasheen Artis: Yes. Yes. So, back in 2017, well, I should start a little bit earlier. So I joined the guild in 2013, uh, became a mentor of the program in [00:08:00] 2014 and, you know, really, you know, start under, you know, understanding what they were trying to do.

you know, reading through the, the, mentees projects and then, joined their selection committee in 2015. Yeah. And in 2017, I was invited to chair the project, the program. And it gave me an opportunity to see, you know, Oh, there's no infrastructure. Oh, they're just kind of winging it. It's like, Oh my God, it was insane.

So I had to, you know, develop a manual and really get a rubric established in terms of how, how the selection process was implemented. and then really made sure that our mentors were trained to be very intentional. So not just give advice, but, you know, give advice and also making sure that they had opened up their Rolodexes and, you know, invited them to [00:09:00] opportunities, different networking, events.

Making sure that there was actual engagement with the participants so that when they culminated and, you know, they practiced their pitches and we had them pitching to, you know, folks like Mary Parent of Legendary Entertainment and Princess Penny, with Issa Rae's, company and her show. And, you know, getting these opportunities that they, they may not have ever had, but they were real opportunities.

So, you know, folks actually reading their scripts, reading their, your treatments and proposals, you know, connecting them like Mary parent, one of our participants, he was a, he was graduating from AFI. And his senior thesis, you know, she connected with him. She connected him to Sundance, like the collab.

And then from Sundance, he was connected to Spike Lee and Spike Lee boarded his project, his senior thesis project as an EP. [00:10:00] And it's like mind blowing. It's insane. But you know, it was opportunities like that, that the, producers guild, diversity workshop. I really, made sure that participants got real, connection.

cause a lot of times, you know, people will bounce from workshop to workshop, program to program, and they're just bouncing. They're not actually getting, you know, projects made. They're not getting, you know, hired. They're not getting agents. but this was really, I was really intentional about making sure that they were going to get something out of it.

Julie Harris Oliver: So you went ahead and produced that program.

Sasheen Artis: I did. I did. I am a producer. That is what I do. Yes. And that

Julie Harris Oliver: feels like the missing piece of so many programs. I was just speaking with the women of, GenXX Project. And Yeah. Yeah. You can shadow your entire life as a director, but it's getting the actual job, getting the actual opportunity to take all of your preparation and all of your education and all of [00:11:00] your practice and, and make it actually

Sasheen Artis: happen.

Exactly. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at the, the landscape of programs out there, there are so many writer's programs, director's programs, animation, editor below the line, all that. But very few for producers. I mean, if you go, you know, you could go and get a degree if you want to go to USC or UCLA, or if you want to, you know, be, if you're already a member of the Writers Guild, you could do their showrunners workshop, but there's very few opportunities to really get that pathway to leadership.

And pathway to, you know, understanding all the things that it takes in order to be a producer, you know, the budget, the schedule, you know, risk management, conflict resolution, you know, negotiations, all the things that we need to know as producers and implement every day on every project. Yeah, it's so important.

Julie Harris Oliver: And. Also like when, when writers get in that producer position, because you've been a wonderful writer, [00:12:00] but you may not have really had any training in those particular skills that you so need in order to make this work.

Sasheen Artis: Right. I mean, producing is managing, you know, a team and it could be a team of a hundred and some odd people, you know, producing is like business.

It's, you know, entrepreneurial, it's, you know, finding financing, it's, you know, connecting with all the people that are going to be involved in this process and being able. to help them see your vision and help them implement that vision. So it is, it is a skill set that is not writing. It's not directing.

It really is very unique and it's a very powerful space. And that's why you'll find that there are a lot of, of people of color that aren't in those spaces. They don't even know how to, or know that they exist, except for the fact that they're the persons that, you know, that's how they get hired. They send their resume to the line producer, to their, to the EP.

So

Julie Harris Oliver: looking back, I was looking back at the episode we did together, 132, [00:13:00] and I'd written in the notes that we, that we had nailed the business case for diversity, which seems so ridiculous to me now and that such archaic language. And why is anyone still proving a business case? And I read something recently on LinkedIn and I wish I had written down the woman who wrote this comment because it has stuck with me and I want to give her credit.

Bye. Bye. Bye. But she asked, it was on a long train of some DEI, something someone had put up. When was the last time a group of white male executives were asked to do a business plan as to why their leadership team should stay homogenous?

Sasheen Artis: And never, never in the history of anything. Yes. In the history of ever, never

Julie Harris Oliver: has that ever happened.

And because we're all just expected to just think that that's, that's, that's the way the Lord, that's

Sasheen Artis: the way. Mm hmm. Mm

Julie Harris Oliver: hmm. Which is absurd. Okay, so knowing where we are now and kind of where we've come in this journey, [00:14:00] what do you think the actual next steps are? Because enough making the business case.

We all know the business case. Mm hmm. So what do you think are our next steps to actually implement some

Sasheen Artis: real change? I think the next steps really Is to start getting into those spaces of leadership because there's no way you're going to be able to convince someone, you know, that they're good with where they are, they're, they're okay with, yeah, they're, they're, they're okay with leaving billions of dollars on the table and wondering, Oh, what do we do?

They're okay with that. And until someone says, okay, this is what we do. And have, and have the power and the authority to say that and do it and implement that. That's when things change. So I feel it's really important for, you know, historically marginalized communities, you know, historically excluded communities, and that's all, you know, all the intersectionality, you know.

Everyone needs to have a place at the [00:15:00] table and they need to have the power to do to do the thing and to make the change. So I think it's really now about, you know, moving those spaces into leadership, moving those creatives into leadership positions and giving them the soft skills training and, you know, all of the tools because, you know, a ceo isn't a ceo just by title a ceo.

You know, they get executive coaching, they learn how to, you know, dress, the learn how to eat, they get all of those things. And no one talks about that. You know, it's very hidden, but you know, there, there are people out there that are selling services to, to CEOs for half a million dollars. It's like, are you serious?

Executive presence.

Julie Harris Oliver: Yes. That's the thing that's taught. Yeah.

Sasheen Artis: And so why is it. They're taught that, but they're not taught how to actually make a creative decision. [00:16:00] You know, how to, you know, how to weigh looking at and looking at a story, looking at a script and whatnot and thinking about the audience that it should, it should be made for and where that audience reside.

You know, when you have all of those things, when you have the executive presence and you have the creative moxie and you know exactly where your project should be, that is gold. That is gold in the bank. And I think it's time for, you know, folks like myself and, and for all the folks that I know who are working in this space to really start thinking about leadership opportunities and training folks to get into spaces of leadership.

Amen.

Julie Harris Oliver: I think this is where

Sasheen Artis: plenty of pie comes in. Exactly. And so that, that's what ended up, you know, I coming out of the producers guilds, diversity workshop, they, they totally, you know, after my term ended in 2020, [00:17:00] we had pivoted during COVID we made it online and it was amazing because then you could, you know, get people from all over to, to, you know, engage.

I realized that it was, you had the opportunity even online to create community. So the virtual space wasn't, a hindrance. It was actually an help. And so I looked at, well, what, what is needed? And obviously for me, it's all about leadership, all about producing and getting people in these, you know, in these spaces to lead.

And so I, I launched a company called plenty of pie. And it's a talent incubator and a production accelerator, to train, provide that soft skills training, that leadership development, as well as those hard producing skills, you know, the budgeting, the scheduling, you know, all, you know, all the things you need to know as a producer.

And a, you know, my production accelerator is really focused on, you know, producing diverse projects, producing, projects that are, you know, whether they're [00:18:00] film, TV, or documentary. But are specifically their core audience is, a diverse audience and diversity is a very, wide ranging, space. So it's not just, it's not just race or ethnicity, it's LGBTQ, it's religion, it's, military.

It's gender, and it's disability and accessibility. And so understanding that there are rich, bountiful stories out there, that, you know, people, they've probably read them. They've possibly even optioned them, but they've never produced them, you know? And it's like, well, if you, if you liked it enough to spend the money on it to option, or you liked it enough to give a person a job on someone else's show, well, maybe we should just like, if we like it, let's, let's make that.

You know, there are literally piles of scripts out there that have never been made that people actually like, you know, that, that, that can be made that can, that do have an audience. And [00:19:00] so, I, I started plenty of pie with the intention of finding and curating those scripts, finding those projects. And, you know, connecting them to distribution, connecting them to funding opportunities and getting them made.

Julie Harris Oliver: So this feels like the most gate kept, if that's how you say the word, gate kept area, is the connecting to the, to get in the room, to pitch, to get to the financing, to get to the power I'm saying in quotation marks, that can make something actually happen because there's a lot of. I think there are a lot of programs that help people prepare and help refine their idea and refine their pitch and get ready to do the thing.

I think where your program, at least one of the ways it's super unique, is to actually make that connection. So how do you

Sasheen Artis: do that? Pick up the phone. A lot of times Because you know some people. I know, and even when I don't know them, I'm like, I make the [00:20:00] case. And I call them cold sometimes if I have to.

Or if I don't, if I don't know them, can I get To someone that I know who knows them because you know, that's what we do as producers. I don't know everyone in this town. Everyone doesn't know me, but you know, that whole six degrees of separation is real. You know, there are, I, I do have six degrees of separation to Kevin Bacon.

It's crazy. It's probably less than six. It really is. And that's a whole story unto it unto itself. But understanding that. We are all connected in this industry, and if I don't know someone, I know someone else does, but it really becomes a question of just picking up the phone and saying, Hey, I have this project or, Hey, this is what I'm trying to do.

Are you interested? Because a lot of times, you know, people don't know they're interested until you ask them and they're like, Hey, well, let's, let's think about it. Let's talk about it. Let's get, you know, get to know each other because it's all about relationships. And, [00:21:00] you know, people want to succeed, they want success, and if you're bringing them an opportunity that smells of success, they want it, they want to know about it, and they want to see how they can get involved, so that's what we, that's what I try to do.

As you're talking

Julie Harris Oliver: about that, you sound so fearless, in a, in a town that's run by fear.

Sasheen Artis: You know, there, there, there's fear. There's healthy fear, you know, and then there's fear that stops you. And I, I understand that, you know, I don't know everything. I don't know everybody. I don't have the money. I don't have the things, but I know that I have a vision and as a producer.

What we do is we take a vision and make it real. That's what we do. That's what i've been doing for the past 20 some odd years like what 29 years. I I take a vision So if you say sasheen, I want to do a [00:22:00] movie about butterflies Okay We could do a movie about butterflies there. There's no fear in that. And because I know, okay, I know what a butterfly is, what type of movie do we wanna make?

Do we wanna make an animation? Do we wanna make a documentary? Do we wanna make some experimental Kafka aspect? It, it's all about knowing what it is, strategizing it out, planning it out, and then doing it. And so for me, fear, it's as long as it doesn't stop me, as long as it doesn't paralyze me, it's healthy.

It's a healthy fear because you don't know until it happens. You know, you don't know until someone picks up the phone. You don't know until they say yes.

Julie Harris Oliver: So back to, I don't know, was that book in the seventies? Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Sasheen Artis: Oh, there you go.

Julie Harris Oliver: Was that Louise Haye, back in the day, I think the phrase still stands.

Sasheen Artis: Yeah. And just to do it, it's the Nike, you know, just do it.

Julie Harris Oliver: So who is this program for [00:23:00] and what can they expect? What's the process?

Sasheen Artis: So it is for emerging creative. So, and I say emerging, if you have, if you've gone to school, you know, if you've graduated from whatever, and you've been in, you know, in somebody's workforce for a couple of years and you really, really said, you know what, I've always wanted to direct, or I've always wanted to write, you know, and you really are looking at, the entertainment industry as a space that's emerging creative to me, that's someone who, who has that passion.

Then I look at also mid career. So maybe you're in this industry. Maybe you've been in it for 10 years and you've been an accountant or you've been, you know, in post and you want to make a pivot and you want to pivot to producing that's fine too, because for me, it's about. Understanding, you know, basic concepts because I'm not a film school.

I'm not teaching lenses. I'm not teaching, you know, you know, the latest cameras. That's not what it is. [00:24:00] I really am focusing on folks that know the basics. Now let's get to the nitty. Let's get to that. You know, let's, let's, you know, break down the script and understand how to budget. let's break it down and you know, how to schedule and build in enough time so that you can make a delivery date, you know, understanding that producing, you know, when I was talking about having a vision and bring, bring it to fruition, you can plan, you know, the best of plans, you know, the best laid plans.

It they will always you know be impacted by all the different troubles of you know, whether it's you know, Whether whether it's people whether it's resources And as a producer you have to overcome Each of those troubles each of those obstacles every hour every day until you get the thing made and you know helping people understand What that feels like and it's, it's, it's great when it, when it all works, you know, it great when you deliver [00:25:00] on time, but even, you know, if you have troubles along the way, if you have those obstacles, how do you overcome them to get to the thing, you know, so

Julie Harris Oliver: overcome it.

Every day, like you might have three terrible days

Sasheen Artis: along. Yes, yes. And so people, I think, so for my, my participants, I'm looking at folks who are willing to take on that challenge because it takes a special kind of person to be willing to overcome challenge and obstacles every day to get to a thing. and it also takes, the plan and the strategy and a logistical person.

because you know, everyone wants at the end, they want the lights, they want the paparazzi and all that and producing, we, we just go on to the next thing, you know, we, we get the, you know, we, we get the opportunity to experience it on the big screen or on the small screen and okay, now we've moved on.

You know, so it really requires a person who has that willingness and that stamina. who, you [00:26:00] know, wants to lead and wants to learn and it's, and again, it's open. It's not, you know, there's no age, minimum is, you know, we'd like for you to be an adult. So 21, but other than that, you know, it's, it's basically, you know, open.

And is

Julie Harris Oliver: it rolling enrollment or do you have cohorts?

Sasheen Artis: So yes, I do have a cohort. I'm going to launch my inaugural cohort, this year. I'm opening, my applications this spring. so people can, go on my website and, just sign in as a, a subscriber. And I, you know, send out a newsletter every couple of months, just giving people updates, what I'm doing, this is what's going on.

This is how you can get engaged me, you know, here and there. And then, I will announce my open, hopefully in the next couple of months, so that way they, people have an opportunity to get ready. Cause you know, we need a script. and [00:27:00] it doesn't have to be, you know, perfect, but it has to be finished.

It has to be a finished script. it cannot be an already produced project. it can be for a documentary, it can be a treatment, a documentary proposal. and I also have a free documentary, proposal template that if people want, they can request from me and I'll send it to them, because. Those are very helpful when you are structuring a documentary because from that proposal, it's like 10 pages.

It really, is very detailed and it helps, the, the creative understand exactly what they're going to shoot, where they're going to shoot it, and, and gives them a roadmap and it helps the reader understand exactly what they're trying to accomplish. So we have proposals available, you know, templates available for them.

and, I do have, currently five projects already in my accelerator. we [00:28:00] have, an FBI project. That's amazing. a woman who is a retired, FBI agent of 34 years of career. she's African American woman, one of the highest ranking, female agents while she was working. And then I have a movie that's a biopic based upon the life [00:29:00] of Hal Walker, who is a laser engineer, African American laser engineer, who's featured in the Smithsonian Institute and the Apollo 11 exhibit.

amazing man. he's, you know, still alive, 90 years old. now he lives in South Africa, with his wife, Dr. Betty Walker, and who is also amazing in her own right. So we're doing a, a biopic on them. And also a documentary series called Common Voices, with the award winning journalist, Bonnie Boswell, who is a journalist, through PBS.

she has a series currently called Bonnie Boswell Reports, and we're doing, a different, type of exploration, for across the country, you know, looking at diverse communities and, you know, what, what we're doing to make America better. Make America great again.

Julie Harris Oliver: I don't know how carefully you're choosing those words.

[00:30:00] It's so, Helpful. I think as you were talking about the documentary kind of pitch template, because it's one thing to say, Oh, I have this great idea for an unscripted something or a documentary. It's a, it's a very different, I found out recently, it's a very different thing to say, okay, what are six episodes going to look like?

What are you actually going to cover? What's the through line? What are you building towards? What's the, you know, there has to be a reason for someone to watch it other than what an interesting thing. So it's an incredible, skill, I think, to help people do. Yeah.

Sasheen Artis: I mean, for us, you know, I've produced about 20 or so docs, and doc series and, you know, you get into a rhythm with them.

and when you're reading something, When I'm reading something that someone says, Oh, it's a great idea. I should be able to see it. I should be able to visualize it along with them. So giving someone a template to help them, along that, [00:31:00] is going to help them with anyone, whether it's me as a producer or anybody else.

being able to read it and visualize it and, and feel that same emotion and greatness on the page is, is key. So giving them that template, I think it's, you know, it's free, it's helpful. and you know, also a lot of times people don't know where to start. So if you say, okay, you know, once upon a time, just start it once upon a time, you know, and go from there.

Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah, and then also I remaining flexible enough to, you know, what if it goes in a, in a really different direction, like the John Batiste documentary that just came out, that went a completely different way than how they played at the beginning of it. It's incredible. Yes,

Sasheen Artis: and you have to be willing as a producer and a director to, to allow your story to breathe and be, you know, take on the, to take on new, purposes.

So, being flexible, but when you're in the pitch mode, when you're, you know, before anything's shot. Being able [00:32:00] to, you know, give someone a clear, delineation as to what they're, they should expect is, you know, that's how you sell it. You know, now if, you know, if, you know, once you film it and you're like, Oh, we have a totally different story.

That's fine. That's why you got to start. You already have the money, but yes,

Julie Harris Oliver: exactly. Don't make the person who's receiving your pitch make it

Sasheen Artis: up, right, right. It's not going to be the same story. It'll be their story.

Julie Harris Oliver: Okay. We talked about how people can find you. How did they apply? We did all of this. Okay.

Yes. Plenty of pie. net and we will link to it in the show notes. Now, can we talk for a minute? We started talking about this before we turn on the microphone. So I definitely want to get in this conversation. Oh, It, it feels like with the streaming wars in chaos and the strikes, like the industry is trying to reinvent its business model, right?

And how is that playing out from where you're sitting? What does that look like to you? I

Sasheen Artis: think, [00:33:00] well, right now I feel the, the industry's in this inertia, you know, the nothing's moving, nothing's happening. And you, you hear about, you know, Oh, someone sold this big package at EFM or someone sold something at Sundance.

And that's great. but the reality is, is that's the one thing that's the two things that may be the 10 things, but that is not going to sustain an industry. So we have to actually get back into, you know, what is this industry supposed to be about? And if it's the business of telling stories, then people have to understand that sometimes that business.

Is not going to be, shareholder connected because the shareholder has a different, you know, imperative than the creative. So we have to rub. So we have to get into a, an alignment where the shareholder understands. [00:34:00] That the business of storytelling is not necessarily the same thing as a consumer product.

It's not the same thing as selling, you know, a Pepsi or a pair of shoes. So I think people have to understand, when they are, you know, if they're launching a production company or they're launching a distribution firm or launching anything that has investors. Be very clear about what your business is about because the business of storytelling, and if we look at the history of the industry, this has always been about selling a product.

So I think our business model really has to focus back on the creative, re really reconnect to, what it was originally meant for, which was brands, selling a brand and, you know, move away from that investor relationship that is, you know, that Trump's everything, you know, that, oh, we have to make money and we have to give money, money, money for our shareholders.

So we're going to lay off, you know, 10, 000 people. No, because now [00:37:00] your business is going to suffer from that. You know, so let's rethink what are our, what we're supposed to be doing as leaders, as producers, as executives in this industry, what this industry was originally created for and go back to that.

Julie Harris Oliver: I worry that the shareholders are in too deep.

Sasheen Artis: Possibly. And also they don't, you know, they're not really connected to the creative. They don't see the value of storytelling. They're just looking to make a buck. And if you're, if you're not connected to the thing that you're making, you know, if you're an engineer and you've built the world's tallest skyscraper, every time you walk past that skyscraper, you know, I have done that.

I've contributed to that. I've made that happen, but the shareholders have absolutely no connectivity to the movies that we make, [00:38:00] the TV series that we produce. They have no, they, they don't understand how valuable they are in that process. And I think we have to really. Engage them on a personal level, engage them on a relationship level.

Understand that, you know, it's not, you know, tech is great tech, you know, tech is tools, but it's really about humans. And it's really about person and person to person connection. Understanding that, you know, if you have an investor, you're, you're not only taking their money, it's a trust. It's a trust that you're building and you want to give them something that they can be proud of.

It's not just, oh, that it made them a lot of money. You want them to be proud of the thing. And I think we've, we've taken out the emotionality of that relationship and we've made it very transactional. And I think that's, that's what has made us fall in this space because this, this is not a, a transactional business.

It is a relationship. It is about human [00:39:00] condition. And when you take that out of the equation, you don't have anything. This

Julie Harris Oliver: does feel like the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it, cause the business itself is profitable as a business. Oh, absolutely. Thousands of thousands of really good jobs. And, but then the added layer of, then you got to pay these people back billions of dollars.

To the detriment of everyone who's making this stuff, it seems insanity to me.

Sasheen Artis: And it is, I mean, there was an article a couple of weeks ago that they, they had a, the industry itself as a whole, movies, you know, TV, documentary, all the things has a trillion dollar valuation. Trillion. T. R. Trillion. I mean, it's like, so we know there's, there's, there's money to be made here.

We know that there's great opportunity here, but I think the relationship of what we're doing to the people who are funding it has become distorted. and I don't think they understand how [00:40:00] important, they are in the process and how we are relating to them. I just think our relationship is broken because it, it, it doesn't serve us when we lose the, the, the thing.

It doesn't serve us when we lose the industry. We doesn't serve us when we, you know, fail, you know, to, to deliver, because we're trying to do, we're just trying to make money. Well, no, we want, we want to actually make a story. We want to make a story that audiences enjoy. And we can't do that if we're just trying to make money, right?

It's

Julie Harris Oliver: the money plus all the things. It's the shaping culture. It's the moving hearts, all the things. so let's talk about, we, we started talking about kind of the IP cycle of book to movie, to Broadway, musical, to movie, musical,

Sasheen Artis: every

Julie Harris Oliver: single thing. and we were talking about the color purple, like that model.

I it's been so fun, like mean girls, wicked rent. [00:41:00] But let's talk about the color purple. It's fresh for me because I watched it last night with my daughter, the musical version. And I said to her, what you said to me, which is I started by reading the book.

Sasheen Artis: Yeah, I started by reading the book. I read the book when I was a teenager and it was a.

A story that made a tremendous impact on me. but to the point where it's like, I don't want to see that song and danced around. I don't want to see, you know, her, her struggles and her, the, the horrors that she lived immortalized in that way. And so that's just my personal take. but I, I also look at it is when they made that movie, you know, what, 30 years ago with Whoopi Goldberg, with Oprah Winfrey, that became a, it's a seminal version.

It was, that was it. It's like, you know, the Godfather, you, you know, you have folks out there that are, you know, reciting the lines from that [00:42:00] movie, you know, they have memes from that movie that has lasted. So even if you never saw that movie, you know, the connection. And to, to remake it, I thought it was unnecessary.

Cause you know, if you're not going to remake the Godfather. Then why would you remake the color purple? You know, it, it had that level of quality, that level of, you know, zeitgeist presence in our culture. It was perfect. And so I look at when, when folks want to do a remake, it's like, well. What, why are you trying to do a remake?

Are there no other stories that touch on, you know, domestic violence or woman personhood, or, you know, are there no other stories out there? Is it that you want to do a story like that, or you just want to see if you could make more money off of the same story and I think we, we fail ourselves tremendously when we.

Don't [00:43:00] want to just try something new. because yeah, I mean, you had, you had a great cast. You had, you know, a great opportunity to, to make something spectacular and a little, you know, millions of people have enjoyed it, but would they have enjoyed something new? You know, would you have connected to an entirely new group of folks that weren't trying to compare it to something else, you know?

Oh, well, I saw that. Well, I saw this on Broadway. Well, I, yeah, I did. You don't want that. You want something fresh. You want something new. You don't want to give people, you know, the, the opportunity to compare it to something seminal, you know, cause it's never going to live up to it. That's the whole point of being seminal.

Well,

Julie Harris Oliver: so I was watching this with my daughter last night, who's 23. And I was like, Oh yeah, the color purple. And I was like, I read the book. I watched the movie. I saw the Broadway show. And now, now here's the musical. And don't get me wrong. I love a musical. I'm, [00:44:00] I'm here for the musical. But when we started watching and, and she was asking like, this is a terrible story.

Like how many hours of black trauma are we going to watch right now? And I was watching it going, Oh yeah. Like what? What and I remember the takeaway from the story being oh, I love that it moved me so deeply Oh, it's so beautiful. But then watching it. It's so traumatic and so Horrible, like it really is the worst story in the whole world and then that's it the final scene Where she has survived, she has triumphed.

The sister came back, you know, we're sobbing, we're sobbing. And it's so beautiful. And I think you, you remember that last feeling as you walk away. And then you think, Oh, I love the color purple.

Sasheen Artis: Cause you remember that, that last feeling, right? Right. But it's a horrific story. I was traumatized when I read the book.

I read it as a teen. It's so bad. And I was like, Oh, my God. [00:45:00] I never want to experience this life. I never, never. But you

Julie Harris Oliver: forget because the feeling that's left with you is beautiful story of triumph. And you forget how horrific

Sasheen Artis: it is. Right. And I think, you know, there are so many stories like that that have yet to be told.

And not, you know, again, they had an opportunity to do it. They took it. They, you know, cast it beautifully. everyone did a great job. Yeah, but how many other stories are out there that have this have similar themes, but you don't have to remake anything. You don't have to go, you don't have to go back to, you know, the 80s.

You don't have to go back, you know, to history. You could do something present day. I just feel. That we're missing out on opportunity because we're too afraid to look at the, you know, the pile of scripts that are already on our desks that have already been optioned that are already, we're already there that have, [00:46:00] you know, that become that writer's calling card that has gotten them the jobs.

Well, let's use that script that they're holding saying, hey, this is a great script and people say, hey, yeah, that's a great script Go work on the show. No, let's go make this script and let's go make this one, you know And I think we're we're missing out on those opportunities for fear for for the fear of oh, what if it doesn't well?

Julie Harris Oliver: Because of the shareholders, because of the profit, because of the, everything has to be such a raging success because of the business.

Sasheen Artis: Right. But, and, and a business model that in any other company and any other industry would be insane. It's like, Oh. We have to spend 250 million dollars on one thing in order for it to make a billion thing, you know, billion dollars.

Yeah. It's like, who, who, that, that does, that, the math isn't mathing, that doesn't even make sense. It's like, why would you put all of your eggs in one basket? And then pray, cross your [00:47:00] fingers, and you know, market however you market to hopefully make a billion dollars as opposed to making ten, twenty five million dollar things.

Remember

Julie Harris Oliver: the twenty million dollar movies that were so beautiful and successful? Remember the early nineties? I mean, maybe people don't remember the early nineties,

Sasheen Artis: but I, well, I do. And you have these personal relationship driven, you know, great pictures that, you know, they, they won the awards, they made the money, but it, the, the business model.

I don't know if it's laziness, because if you have to make one thing at 250 million, that, that, that reduces the amount of time you have to spend. You know, yes, you're spending more money, but it's only one thing. But if you make 10 things at 25, then you have 10, you know, 10 things you gotta make. But it's like, that, that to me, it's insane.

And no other company, no other industry would just put, it's like Apple saying, Oh, we're only going to make the phone. It's like, really? [00:48:00] No, Apple's never going to make just a phone. They're going to make a whole bunch of things. And they're going to hope that, you know, you as a consumer finds one thing that you like, and you may find other things that you like, what you mean?

Julie Harris Oliver: We should diversify the product.

Sasheen Artis: Hello, diversify the product, diversify the stories, diversify the, the, the people who are making it, diversify your workforce.

Julie Harris Oliver: Hey, well, I'm going to put you in charge cause you're making the most sense.

Sasheen Artis: Well, you know, I'm sure I'm not the only person out there, I just, I feel like, at this point, no one wants to be that person, no one wants to say what they're thinking, because I can't be the only person, you know, it's just that.

You know, there's a lot of folks out there that fear losing their jobs, fear, you know, not getting the same fear, not getting promoted. And fear is fear kills things. Fear is a killer. You know, it's a killer.

Julie Harris Oliver: Well, it's a whole industry of creatives. And I'd say the [00:49:00] percentage of them who are saying, well, I really got to make this come through with the shareholders.

It's, it's really

Sasheen Artis: small. They're not saying that at all, but what they are saying is we have to make it for the audience. We're, we're trying to make this story, you know, we want to tell this amazing story. We want to show this, you know, amazing experience. Or we want, you know, want people to have a great laugh or, you know, we want people to be scared and, you know, be frightened and have that fun experience.

I mean, I think people are making it for people. And I, and I think we as producers, we, as you know, executives have to reconnect the shareholders so that they understand too, they are audience. They are, we're making this for them, their audience. So,

Julie Harris Oliver: how do you keep going in the face, cause this work is hard, and you're doing it in the face of a consistently disappointing

Sasheen Artis: machine.

Yes, I, [00:50:00] yeah, I think, you know, I, I keep going, I keep going, and I keep going. I, actually I had a, I had the pleasure of watching two movies this past holiday, holiday, Nyad. well, it was on, it was on Netflix and then a million miles away on Amazon prime. Those two movies were like quintessential lessons in tenacity.

It's like. You keep going, you don't give up. Even when people tell you, no, you keep going and you just keep going and you keep going and you keep trying and you keep trying and it is, it's tiring, but you know, in your heart of hearts that the thing is going to work, you know, that you can do the thing, you know, that whatever, whatever the obstacle is, you're trying to overcome.

It is overcomable. You know, you just have to come at it in different ways until you get to that other side. So I, I, I have this. [00:51:00] You know, when one of the lines in the a million miles miles away was tenacity is a superpower. And if you can embrace that and you can hold on to that and you can just keep going and say, oh, okay, this isn't going to work.

Okay, let's try this. Let's make this happen. And, oh, that's not going to work. Okay, well then let's try this. Cause you know, it has, this has to happen. We know. The vision has to come to fruition. So I, you know, I just keep, I stay in prayer. I'm like, okay, Lord, I can go work at Costco any day now. Let me know, but until such time, I'm just going to keep going and I'm going to keep doing it.

Julie Harris Oliver: We hope so much. Well, I'll speak for myself. I hope so much that it's like that cartoon where the person is digging a hole underground. And the thing they're seeking is just right there and they don't know they're right here. And so

Sasheen Artis: they give up. Cause once,

Julie Harris Oliver: once the barrier breaks, it feels like [00:52:00] then it'll be super accelerated.

Sasheen Artis: And I think so. And I, and I, and I have to hold on to that as a belief and know that again, I'm not the only person out there. This isn't, you know. What I'm doing, you know, people do there, there are hundreds of thousands of producers all across the world and all these different countries making the thing.

And we know that when you give producers the opportunity to make the thing and you give them a deadline, it's going to happen, they're going to deliver. And so, yeah, we make the thing. And so I, I believe that. If you, you know, give me that opportunity. If we say, okay, Sasha, go ahead, make, you know, make your five projects in your accelerator.

You know, we're going to allow you to, train 200 producers. It's going to happen, you know, and not only are those 200 producers are going to get trained, but then they're going to go out and make 20 projects. And so you have exponential, you know, things happening and you have that shift [00:53:00] and it's a slow, you know, slow progress until it's not until it, you know, it's full speed ahead.

And, you know, I just keep going and knowing that it is going to happen.

Julie Harris Oliver: Well, you've inspired me. Tell me what advice you have for people coming up.

Sasheen Artis: I think the biggest thing is don't be afraid. don't be a yes person just because you're afraid. be honest with people, be reliable. I think, you know, this industry, a lot, you know, a lot of people say, you know, when you're, when you're trying to get in, in whatever form or fashion, whether you're, you know, creative or not, you know.

You have to show up, you know, you have to be there. You have to actually, you know, if someone says, okay, I'm gonna give you a shot, take the shot. You know, don't, don't be like, oh, don't be [00:54:00] afraid to take that shot. I think a lot of folks. They get, you know, they get someone on the end of the phone and then they don't know what to say, you know, and it's like, you know, practice, strategize, practice and pick up the phone and say what you want to say.

Ask for the thing you want to ask for, you know, ask for that opportunity. Or, you know, if you, if you see an opportunity that is made for you, take that opportunity. don't be afraid because. There, there's no barrier in this industry that can't be overcome. And that, that's, that's a hard thing to, to, to say, you know, knowing all the barriers that are here, but they ha they can be overcome and you just have to figure out that way to overcome it and ask people, don't be afraid to ask for help.

Julie Harris Oliver: Is there anything I didn't ask you about that I should have asked you about?

Sasheen Artis: Oh my, [00:55:00] no, I think we covered everything. For me, it's, you know, Plenty of Pie. Oh, I have, a webinar series currently that I'm offering folks. I do on plentyofpi. net. It's called Demystify Entertainment. we're doing a, TV series development workshop as well as a fundraising for media projects workshop.

They are fee based. and you also receive a 15 minute online consultation with me. I answer questions. I give advice, whatever you need, you know, to, to help you navigate this industry.

Julie Harris Oliver: Wonderful. Okay. People can find you at p plenty of pie.net any place else. Yes. You want them.

Sasheen Artis: and you know, I'm on, I'm on LinkedIn.

I'm, I'm always wanting to connect to folks on LinkedIn and I'm on Instagram. just my name, nothing, nothing interesting. Just Sasheen Artis on Instagram. LinkedIn, and Plenty of Pie.net Okay. [00:56:00]

Julie Harris Oliver: It is always such a pleasure talking with you next time before six years go by.

Sasheen Artis: Thank you. Yes.

Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Julie. I appreciate it.

Julie Harris Oliver: You've been listening to the other 50 percent a herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. Thank you to Sasheen Artis for sharing her story. And special thanks to Jay Rose, Dani Rosner, and Allison McQuaid for the music. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and rate and leave a review to help other people find it.

You can reach me at julieharrisoliver at gmail. com. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

EP 235: GenXX

GenXX

Julie Harris Oliver: [00:00:00] Hi friends. You're listening to The Other 50%, a Herstory of Hollywood .I'm Julie Harris Oliver. For today, I got to speak with a group of female directors behind the initiative called GenXX. Maria Burton, Susan Dynner, Monique Sorgen, and Nandi Bowe. Maria and Monique have been on this podcast before, episodes 14 and 131 respectively, which you can still find on the website.

All of these women have banded together to create the Gen XX Initiative, which they're going to tell us all about. Now. You can find us at theotherfiftypercent.com, all spelled out in letters, as well as all the podcast places. You can find links to everything I'm up to on the link tree that is in the show notes and@julieharrisoliver.com here.

Have a listen. Okay? Welcome to the other 50%. I'm sitting with the founders of the Gen XX Initiative. Nandi Bowe, Maria Burton, Susan Dynner, and Monique Sorgen. Welcome everyone. Thank you. So, just to say, the Gen XX [00:01:00] initiative was created to promote the female directors of Generation X who have been enthusiastically pursuing your goals and building accolades for years as directors.

You started at the beginning of your careers facing sexism, and now it's butting right up against ageism. Between the four of you, you've directed numerous projects, won countless awards, participated in all the programs, including ABC Disney, CBS, Sony, Ryan Murphy's Half, Project Her, Sundance, Black Magic Collective, DGA's DDI, DGA's Learning Tree, and Film Independent.

You have premiered and or won festivals, including Sundance, South by Southwest, Cannes, AFI, et cetera. You've been doing all the things. And yet you're not at the studio level of career that you deserve to be, that you've earned, that you want to be. And so here comes this initiative, Gen XX. Let's talk about that.

What brought you together [00:02:00] to do this initiative? To start with Monique.

Monique Sorgen: Well, the initiative came to be so three of us had were having lunch. And we were kind of talking about our hopes and dreams as we want to do. And at one point, you know, we were sort of like, why are we doing all this stuff? Why have we done all this stuff?

And it hasn't happened for us. And I think that's a question a lot of people in this business. Ask themselves, but at that moment, I kind of realized and I was like you know, I think the sexism that I faced when I was younger led directly to the ageism that I'm facing today. And then Susan was like, Oh my God, that's so true.

We should start an organization. And Maria was like, and what if we call it Gen XX because of the double X chromosome? And so in that moment over a meal, we decided that we would do something proactive toward what we'd been facing all along [00:03:00] and, you know, Maria knew Nandi and loved her and introduced her to us.

And so we asked Nandi to be a part of our initiative and the rest is becoming history.

Maria Burton: That's right. We've actually, we're surprised to realize that was a year ago and in this year. The one positive thing about the strike for us was that all the studio executives had time to take meetings with people who were not talking.

We're not pitching because of course that was not allowed, but we were able to talk about Gen X, X. And an interesting thing is many of the studios have programs for television directing to, to try and increase the numbers for underrepresented directors. But not in feature films and in feature films, women are still 1.

5 directors to 10 male directors. So there's a big room for improvement and people were very receptive. So it was a [00:04:00] good use of the strike time.

Susan Dynner: And we also realized between the four of us. We each knew 50 other women who were uniquely talented, capable directors who also weren't getting that shot. So we thought there was a niche that needed to be filled and who better to do it than us.

So we got very actively involved and we're excited about this and we hope that it makes a difference.

Julie Harris Oliver: Exactly, Susan. And it's funny cause We do feel, well, I've seen some doors are being opened for younger women, right, or the women coming up and doors are being open for people of all kinds to get into this business, but there's a, Hey, wait a minute.

We're not done yet. Like, don't count us out. Just because we're opening doors for the next generation. It doesn't always have to be the brand new shiny person getting the Opportunity. I mean you are all bright and shiny people getting offered

Maria Burton: and I think one thing about the whole movement to bring in all voices and have all voices represented is the importance of [00:05:00] storytelling from Different points of view and one of those points of view would be people with more experience of life You know that so you don't want just a certain age group You want people along the whole spectrum of age as well as all races and all genders.

Julie Harris Oliver: Nandi we haven't heard from you what did you think when they came to you

with this idea?

Nandi Bowe: One of the things I love is that these are women who I admire These are our women. We are women who have done lots of work. We constantly sort of. Inspire each other because of all the things we've done.

And so I love the idea of a group of women who are not looking for, you know, we're happy to shadow, but we don't need to shadow in order to be ready to do the work. We're ready to do the work.

And that's what I love.

Julie Harris Oliver: Speaking of shadowing, should we talk about the programs a bit? Have all of you done programs?

And how were they in terms of success and getting you jobs out

of Nandi?

Nandi Bowe: When I did Disney, we weren't even guaranteed an [00:06:00] episode. I think now programs are starting to realize that they really need to guarantee episodes. But when I did my Disney program, we weren't guaranteed an episode. So while it was wonderful opportunity it, it just didn't lead to the opportunities that we hope.

Julie Harris Oliver: As I feel like that's changing across the board, I know Karen Horne makes a big effort to do that.

Susan Dynner: Well, I'll just say, in my experience. Okay, Susan. I've done several programs. When we did the Sony, for example. They had 15 fellows and out of the 15 of us, only five were chosen to shadow because of their budget.

And a lot of it is down to the fact that they're just the, even the DEI execs are not supported in a way that they should be. I don't know that if it's just optics or if they really want to put their money where their mouth is, I know that the DEI execs really do. So I think it's a problem of prioritizing what they really want or need for their networks or studios.

Julie Harris Oliver: I mean, we can do a whole podcast on what's happening with DEI execs across the industry, but [00:07:00] Another time maria, go ahead.

Maria Burton: I've also done many programs i've done. Sony abc disney cbs ryan murphy And they've all been really great experiences, but I did them all just in the abc disney ended in 2020 And right after that is when they started guaranteeing episodes because I was an example of someone who i'd get teed up for a show I'd spend months shadowing Mostly on my own dime.

I mean, you know, some of them have a small stipend, but they don't even cover if you're, for example, going up to Vancouver to shadow and I looked at it as my grad school to be investing in this opportunity. And then the shows would either go away that pandemic hit. The strike, you know, it's really important that they are now guaranteeing so that people aren't already underrepresented and then jump through extra hoops and then still don't get the opportunity.

So I'm very happy that [00:08:00] the programs now are doing that.

Monique Sorgen: One of the big things that the DGA got in the new contract was that these programs are now required to guarantee an episode. And so that's a great thing because it's going to move the needle, but it's also means that they're going to be able to accept many fewer people each year in the program.

So it's a give and take, because less people are going to have opportunity to do the programs and learn the stuff that we learned in those programs, but more people who get the, all the people who get the programs will, if all goes well. Direct their first episode, and those will all be diverse people.

Susan, jump in there.

Susan Dynner: And can I just add, there aren't really many programs that exist at the studio level like they do at the network level. So that's why we feel like we want to get our fellows or members of the initiative opportunities to direct features, hopefully at the studio level.

Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah, so it seems like all the programs are aimed at [00:09:00] television.

And yet the numbers in films are terrible.

So what do we do

for that piece?

Maria Burton: I think it was easier to address television first because most of the programs, certainly when these, when the studio programs were started, the series would have 2022 episodes so they could. Look at the numbers and say, we have room to put in some new people.

Now, even that has changed so much because now they're limited series with fewer episodes, often even directed by only one or two directors. That model is changing. So we're lucky that these programs existed while there was a bit of a opening and with features, it's so much more difficult to insist.

Like, Oh, you have to put one person into an episode because the feature is the whole, the one director for the single feature. So I think that studios are having a difficult time [00:10:00] figuring out how that would work. And that's one reason that it's been nice to go in and talk with them about this and pitch our ideas.

Monique Sorgen: The other thing in TV that helps the studios feel assured is that the crew doesn't change from episode to episode. So, if a director comes in, you know, and they don't live up to the expectation, which happens, by the way, very rarely, but if that happens, The DP knows the show, the production designer is still going to get the production right.

The script supervisor is going to still be on top of it and the actors know their roles. So there's, you know, there's more of a safety net there. And that's why when they have tried to do like what is considered their feature department programs, they've ended up doing a series of shorts instead. But, you know, at the same time to take more to answer your question, like someone like Maria has directed six independent features already.

So if you talk about mitigating risk, you know, she has definitely [00:11:00] proven that, you know, and even when it comes to making the jump from shorts to features, like I have four different award winning projects. You know, each with multiple awards. So again, like while I haven't done a feature, I've done a web series, which is a lengthier than a short, and I've done several shorts and all of them are award winning.

So again, it's like that there are ways to mitigate the risk by just looking at that. And frankly, when it comes to men, they have always been willing to make that. Leap or we wouldn't have any directors at all.

Julie Harris Oliver: So amazing. Like if the attitude is in, well, you do web series. Oh, you do shorts, but it feels like the I have like 10 questions in my head at the same time right now.

One is

for this initiative, apart from

sharing awareness and Hey, do you know, you're leaving out this big chunk of talent when you're hiring? What else do you hope we do achieve with the initiative, Susan?

Susan Dynner: Our [00:12:00] goals are definitely mainly to first and foremost, to bring awareness that there are these talented women that are overqualified and ready to work, that have been doing it for years and that they should be hired.

And the age is not a barrier. If you look at, I think Monique brought it up earlier today, like they did the birthdays in the Hollywood Reporter of some of the directors and they were like age 75, 80, wait a minute, we're still young and vibrant. Well, how old is he? He's shooting right now. Exactly. All of them, you know, not going to name names.

Maria Burton: It's great for us because it means that we still have a very long runway ahead of us.

Susan Dynner: We've got like 40, 50 years. So we have plenty of experience and plenty of time ahead in our careers. But we want to also bring opportunities to women to direct. So one of our goals is to, you know, get a fund to direct feature films.

and or anthologies series, whatever we can do. We just want to be directing and we just want to showcase the work that all [00:13:00] these amazingly talented female directors who are of the Gen X age are able to do.

Monique Sorgen: And another thing we want to do is we want to create, we're going to create a Gen XX stamp, which we will put on projects that are directed by Gen X women starting with this year.

And that will also help raise awareness of the amazing work that Gen X women are already doing. And so the more Gen X stamps, Gen XX stamps that we get out there. You know, the more people will be able to say like, Oh, why isn't this person directing a feature? Why isn't this person directing television at the studio level?

So that's something else that is on our mission. And then there's also a whole component of giving back, which is, you know, we want to use these projects to hire gen X women. Keys below the line, and we also plan to [00:14:00] mentor the next generation of women in shadowing opportunities and lower level positions and really kind of pass on our expertise that we've gained over all these years to them.

Julie Harris Oliver: Oh, good. Thank you for answering the question. What about everybody else?

Susan Dynner: One more thing is we do also create a database of women who are Gen X directors where we can showcase their bios, but also what they are working on currently. So that if somebody is looking for, oh, we are looking for a thriller with this kind of lead who is directed by a Gen X woman, they can just look through the database and hopefully we'll become the go to database where we can help get people hired.

Excellent. And Nandi and Maria are trying to get in.

Nandi Bowe: I wanted to say that. We also are looking forward to the different stories that are going to be told when a different point of view is out there, not only in my African American, I'm also to say, and so to have stories about women who are [00:15:00] mature women and who have other challenges and who look different than whatever the status quo is, that's a huge, that's a huge opportunity, both for audiences

and also.

Julie Harris Oliver: And how much more interesting than another superhero movie?

Maria Burton: Right and relatable and another thing is we have a fiscal sponsorship through film independent. So Our motto is telling stories by women about women for everyone and There will be many stories under that umbrella And ultimately people can run financing.

If people are wanting to give money or the mission, instead of like through a LLC investment, they can run that through our gen XX fiscal fund.

Julie Harris Oliver: Oh, wonderful. And so then is the hope we might produce some more independent work that then showcases the talent that can then translate into studio work?

Cause [00:16:00] that's the bridge, right? How do we. How do we address that piece of it?

Monique Sorgen: Well, as we may have mentioned before, we've already taken a bunch of meetings at the studios with the DEI executives. And, you know, we've taken meetings with Film Independent, obviously, since they're our fiscal sponsor.

But our goal is to continue taking meetings with people, with agents, with producers, with showrunners and executives at all levels, and even beyond the DEI level. Just to continue to create awareness about the fact that these Gen X women directors exist, that we've been here all along, that we have the experience and we're ready to go, and that there are just a lot of us.

Maria Burton: And the way that Ava DuVernay was so successful with hiring directors onto Queen Sugar and showing that all you have to do is give the opportunity and these directors were fantastic and now they've all gone on to have great careers. It's the same idea. [00:17:00] Give people that opportunity to show their talents and then other people will continue to hire them.

Julie Harris Oliver: I know I err on the side of being a bit of a radical. I just want to say to all of the studio, just hire people.

Susan Dynner: We actually have some great statistics on, in our deck, which is available through our website, which is www. genxx. info. So you can come see some of those statistics for yourself. And it's pretty eyeopening, you know, in this day and age it's kind of still unbelievable.

Julie Harris Oliver: Just do it. Just do it. Tell me how you have kept your enthusiasm and your hopes and dreams and your energy around this work when I imagine, I believe it has been so hard. Monique.

Monique Sorgen: Well, I've tried quitting a million times. I mean, I've kept lists of other jobs I might be able to do, but none of them ever kind of sparked joy in me.

One time I even moved to Paris.[00:18:00] Because I thought to myself, Paris is beautiful. I love it here. I speak, I'm half French, so I can work in France. And I basically was there thinking like, Oh, maybe if I leave show business and I'll just get another job and I'll be happy because. I'll just be in this beautiful place.

Right. Within one week of being there, I was going to movie premieres and everyone I was meeting was in show business in Paris. And I kind of realized, Oh my God, this is who I am. This is what I do. So I ended up coming back to LA with the understanding that like, it's really about the journey.

You know, I love what I do. It makes me happy every day when I'm doing it. Not so much when I'm looking for work, doing it. But when I'm actually doing it, it just gives me so much joy. And I kind of realized that like giving up wasn't even an option. And once I had that realization, there was kind of, for me, there was kind of an acceptance of like, this is what I've signed up for.

Susan Dynner: Yeah, for me it's never even been an option to do [00:19:00] anything else. This is in my bones. It's what I love. I, it brings me joy, like much like Monique. I also produce, so I'll produce other filmmakers work that I don't direct. So I found a way to be in it no matter what, but I just, I have to do it.

There's no other alternative. And I feel like everybody can do it no matter what, whether it's a hobby or whether you do make it a career, you can always find a way of making money on the side or doing something to support yourself. But if it's really, truly a passion, you'll figure out a way to keep doing it.

Nandi Bowe: I came out of assistant directing. And so I've been on sets from the age of 20. I've watched some of the best directors in the world direct and I've helped them bring their vision to light. I am a writer as well. And so that's one of the ways that I've managed to sort of keep myself inspired during the times when I'm not directing.

Is that I write my own projects because, you know, especially as an African American woman, I've known [00:20:00] that the projects I want to see in the world aren't necessarily being written. So I've taken on writing as well as a way to create projects.

Maria Burton: Wonderful, and I feel very lucky to have a company also with my sisters our five sisters productions company because we are able to Continue to generate a lot of work.

We have a series called half the history sort of like your other 50 But it's about the stories of women that have been untold in history and The features that i'm passionate about telling are also stories of women that have been Not yet told and so I think between Being able to work as a producer and writer on the projects with my sisters and then do my own directing Whether it's something with five sisters productions or as a director for hire.

I'm Excited to always keep going and telling those stories

Monique Sorgen: [00:21:00] And I think Maria brings up an interesting point because like, we're not here because we chose to do this as a job. We're here because we're storytellers, because we have a voice that needs to be heard and stories that we wanna tell, and a point of view that we feel is not getting out into the world.

And a lot of people in this business are here for that reason. And so when you kind of go back to the root of your passion, like what is it I'm really trying to say with my projects? You know, like I have personally a lot of stories about being a single woman. That's really important to me because I feel like there's not enough acceptance of women just choosing not to get married or choosing not to have families.

And that's an important story that I've probably written four different ways, you know, and that's just one thing that I have to say, but that's something that's, you know, and I think we all kind of have that thing or those. Those categories of things where we're like, why won't people accept a woman [00:22:00] who does this or a person who does this?

Cause it doesn't necessarily always have to be about a woman. Sometimes there, you know, are people of all kinds. That we're just saying to ourselves, like, why isn't this person accepted? I want this person to be accepted. I want this person to be heard and understood. And I want this story to exist. And so that's kind of the driving force.

Why I think most of us continue to do what we do, despite all the heartache and all the challenge involved.

Julie Harris Oliver: Well, we know how powerful it is and how quickly it can change culture. With film television, right? It's so, it's so important.

Susan Dynner: I mean, I, yeah, personally, like I've been a band photographer from the age of 15.

So I have stories to tell galore. Being on the red bands and stuff. And I'm also a magician and I'm doing a documentary right now about women in magic. So I feel like we all bring unique perspectives and unique life experiences. That, that would be amazing stories to tell. So [00:23:00] that's what we're trying to do here.

Julie Harris Oliver: I know the advice for so long has been

create your own work and do it that way. Is that still your advice?

Nandi Bowe: It's so important as a storyteller and as a filmmaker that you you're moved by the stories you want to tell. Because Who From beginning to end, it's a long road. And so I definitely feel like you have to, you just have to be moved by the story you're telling, whether it's your story or someone else's, it has to be a story that gets you up on the hard days and on something that matters.

Maria Burton: I, I agree with creating your own work, but I think this is a huge thing that we are trying to push with Gen X is to the whole reason to be allowed to work on the studio level is to have access to bigger budgets. And to tell stories on a bigger level or just tell bigger stories because sometimes I underrepresented directors have been ghettoized into a smaller [00:24:00] scale that can Translate into having to tell smaller stories and those are not the only stories we have to tell So this is a big reason behind our push

Monique Sorgen: And yes, you do have to create your own work when you're starting out because you have to prove to people that you know what you're doing.

But where GenXX comes in is that we have created our own work over and over again. And so what we're saying is we've proven to you that we know what we're doing now. Give us a budget so that we can do something that really has a bigger impact because it has a bigger audience.

Maria Burton: I think something that's interesting about the bigger budget too, is there's a myth that, Oh, if you've only worked on a smaller scale, it will be hard to jump to a larger budget when in reality it's so much easier when you have.

The tools and the experience crew and [00:25:00] plenty of crew instead of people doing multiple jobs. And so it's having that opportunity as well.

Monique Sorgen: And not being in charge of everything. Like to me, the dream is to get to direct a project where the only job I had to do was to direct. I mean, on my projects I have had to produce, I have been the writer, I have been the production designer and in post production I'm the head PA.

Julie Harris Oliver: So bring in the donuts, right? So seeing what's been going on with the business this year, all the strikes, the

shutdowns, the mergers, the, it feels to

me, and I would love, I'd love to hear what you think about it. It feels like the business itself is undergoing a revolution and the business model feels a little broken and needs to be remade.

Do you have any thoughts

about the whole business model of it all, Nandi?

Nandi Bowe: We forget how young the film business and [00:26:00] television is in general. And so I think we sort of revolutions and evolutions make it possible for new openings. And so that's what I'm banking on is the fact that as the industry evolves, there'll be new opportunities and new openings.

Certainly the internet has provided that for us. I just have to keep imagining that there's going to be new openings as the industry progresses.

Susan Dynner: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, when I first started in this industry, creatives ran studios, it's hard to think of that now, right? Cause it's such, such a business model and investor and all this other, I think the studios were far more successful back then than they are now.

And it was being run by creatives who actually cared about the product that they were putting out, which happened to be a film, but we want to kind of disrupt that. That's why we started gen XX. We want to do something different. We're trying to think of new creative ways to finance films at a studio level where it doesn't have to be just all about the business.

It can be about. Also being passionate about what you're making or having a message [00:27:00] that you want to, you know, get out there to the masses. Yeah.

Julie Harris Oliver: I think it, what does success look like is being changed or has changed. So it feels like it needs to shift away from wall street and shift back to. art.

Susan Dynner: I mean, if you think about it, the movies that were winning Oscars back 20, 20, 30 years ago, we're all studio films. And now in the past 10 years, none of them are studio films are all indie films. So it's something's got to give.

Monique Sorgen: Yeah. So there's a couple things that play obviously with the shift. One is that the studios went from being private to being public.

So now they're valuated based on their potential rather than being evaluated based on how much money they're actually making. Whereas during the time that Susan was talking about when creatives were running the studios. You know, the studios were private and they were just concerned about how many hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars they made that year.

How much were they in the black? And the numbers were astronomical [00:28:00] now that, you know, now that's not how they're evaluated anymore. They're evaluated on like how much growth they've had. And this is not necessarily a growth business. This is. A profitable business. So I think that's problem number one.

The second problem is technology and the technological changes to the industry have come in two ways. The first is the streaming revolution where everything has gone on to streaming faster than they were able to figure out how to monetize streaming. So that's also caused them to be less profitable.

And the second technological issue that we're facing up against now is AI. And the fact that if the studios have their way, they will be making projects entirely with computer engineers and leave the creatives out of the process at all. Now that's a possible negative, but how I see it is that's where the opening is, that people are probably, some [00:29:00] people will want to watch AI made movies.

But there's going to be a whole side industry that will crop up with going back to the old, the older model where studios are private and they're just making a profit. They're just in the black every year. And they're making movies about humans with humans, about the human experience, because fundamentally the reason.

That we appreciate art as humans is because it reflects our life and our society back to us. And AI is going to have a harder time doing that than humans. And yeah, so basically I think there's going to be a second branch of the industry that's going to start to crop up and the way I see it is going to be like with groups like us creating New material using creative ways to find finances and new avenues for that, but also with like the smaller companies like a two, four and neon, these companies, they're going to kind of lead the [00:30:00] way to be that branch.

And there will be now two branches, right? The branch of studios making AI driven projects, and then the branch of humans making human driven projects. And so I do have hope for where we're going. It's just a matter of finding the money that wants to invest in that. And that's the kind of thing we want to do.

Susan Dynner: I just wanted to say that ironically, you know, AI is never going to be a substitute for humans because we are the creators. We are coming up with all these new and revolutionary ideas, thoughts, and concepts. Ironically AI can do the algorithms that the studio heads do. So I don't know who should be watching out here more, us or them?

Cause they can't do their job without us. That's so funny. Who should be more worried?

Julie Harris Oliver: What do you hope your legacy will be as a group and

individually?

Nandi Bowe: I would love just for us to be another opening for experienced directors.[00:31:00] To have opportunities to tell stories that aren't being told and to support each other in that.

Maria Burton: It's interesting to think about because my mother worked very hard as a feminist in the 70s and pushed open doors for people not least of which were her five daughters. And she felt that the world would be different for us and we believed that when we were kids and I hope that The world is different for my nieces.

I think we saw a Statistic recently that was things wouldn't change wait monique. I think you had the statistic Can you jump in there with it? It was

Monique Sorgen: Yeah, it was just put out by Women in Film, I believe, that if we continue to progress by 25 percent every five years, women directors will reach parity in 2072.

But history has shown us that we don't incrementally progress. [00:32:00] By 25 percent or even 5 percent or even forward without also going backward, like, you know, progress goes up and it goes down and it goes up and it goes down. And so the fact of the matter is, we're not going to get there by the time any of us or any of our grandchildren die.

The only way to really progress. Is to just do it the way what made a change was Ava DuVernay saying, I'm just going to hire women moved the needle. That's how you make progress. You just have to decide to do it and do it right now. And we could be at parody next year. If we just did that.

Susan Dynner: And that's one of the goals that we strive for.

I mean, we'd love it if in the next 10 years, we are obsolete because all Gen X women are actively directing films and TV, you know, that's a dream. In terms of legacy, that would be amazing.

Monique Sorgen: Yeah. And in terms of legacy for me, I will say probably why Maria and I get along is my father was also a civil rights lawyer.

[00:33:00] And so he really moved the needle through the legal system on a lot of really important issues. And so I have a high bar to reach with my filmmaking. And I know that's one of the reasons I went into filmmaking. So as a filmmaker, I really hope that my films Change the way women are perceived in the world and open up the possibilities for who they can be and what they can do with their lives.

As Gen XX I also hope that our legacy will be to move the needle greatly for all women who want to be directors and who want to be anything they want to be in this business. And we're going to do whatever we can to move the needle as far as we can, as long as we have this organization. And

Maria Burton: i'll jump in Also on the projects that we do.

I know for me We're talking about this organization opening up the opportunity for women And on the projects I make I feel it's so [00:34:00] important to change the culture for all people like people You know what we the movies and television that we make both reflects and creates our culture going forward And so I have four nieces and four nephews and I want them to value all people equally and grow up seeing that and then if it's modeled to them, then they will perpetuate that and It's so such a strong thing that we can do with what we create.

So I want to create that myself. I want to give other people the opportunity to create that and then affect people who are not in this business, just the world in general.

Monique Sorgen: And one more thing in regards to gen XX, you know, we're talking about generation X directors. Who are meeting the intersection of sexism and ageism and one thing that we're doing for future generations that maybe they aren't thinking about or don't want to think about.

Is we're confronting [00:35:00] ageism, and that's something that every single filmmaker of every gender and every race and every ability is going to come up against at some point if they make it that far. Right, so we're really confronting something that everyone's going to have to face if they're very lucky.

The alternative is not better. Exactly.

Susan Dynner: And really quickly, just to speak to that, although we are specifically focused on Generation X. We hope that older women also get the same opportunities. I mean, we want to try and hire as many women directors as possible. So although we in particular are focused on Gen X women we hope that all women of all ages get direct jobs.

Julie Harris Oliver: I want to say thank you for your service to the business and the culture. I also want to point out, I know that you all came onto this recording today, like from continuing education with the Alliance of Women Directors. Like you are [00:36:00] still

in it,

training, working, learning. The constant work that I know you all do.

I don't know if it's unique to women in this business, in this organization, but the dedication to the continued networking and learning and growth. I think is just another thing that sets you apart and makes you that much more qualified.

Susan Dynner: I think you have to. I mean, I always learn in just life. I learn things all the time.

So why not in film technology is ever evolving. We have new tools at our disposal. There's now virtual production. There's, you know, all kinds of new things that are coming up and we need to be ready and know how to utilize that. And

Maria Burton: also shout out to Marnie cage. All Evans is the one who's teaching this morning.

Rachel Ramis teaches for free all the time. I think we are such a community of sharing and trying to pull each other up. And [00:37:00] that's a wonderful thing that has happened in the community of women. Filmmakers. And

Julie Harris Oliver: there was something you said earlier, Maria, about the two steps forward, one step back. Cause it felt like we made a lot of progress and then 2020 happened and then recovering from 2020 and then the strikes happened.

And I think we all have to try to push through and keep the momentum going and not just let the industry revert back to, Oh, now we're just going to hire all the people we know again until we get this going. It's not the right time for all this diversity business. I think we really have to push to continue the momentum and keep it all going.

Maria Burton: Thank

you. Well said.

Julie Harris Oliver: I would love to hear just what each of you either are working on or just recently worked on or want to promote, want us to go see, want us to look up. I'd love to hear from each of you. I'm going to go around the,

around the horn here. So Monique.

Monique Sorgen: All right. So what am I working on? Well, I spent a lot of time working on the GenXX initiative recently.

Good [00:38:00] job. Good job. I also have a short film that just finished the festival circuit. And another short film that's currently on the festival circuit and a web series that I have just released called codependent socks, which you can find on a website called cold open. com cold with a K and so that. Is a family, a traditional family sitcom starring sock puppets.

And it's a seven part web series. It takes about 26 minutes to watch the whole thing. And the great thing about the platform cold open is it's basically aggregating web series with the purpose of exposing them to executives and agents. To get them picked up for ongoing series. So you may notice what I did there is I made a 26 minute show and then made it a web series that serialized with seven episodes to show that it can work [00:39:00] both as a web series.

And as a pilot for an ongoing sitcom that could be made either continuing with stock puppets or could also be made live action with what puppeteers would call fleshies. So those are some of the things that I have done recently. And and aside from that, I am looking for financing for a feature film.

Julie Harris Oliver: Can you tell us the titles of the shorts?

Monique Sorgen: So the short that just finished was called random check and that was actually a dramatic short I normally do comedy but I was hired to do that one and it's about a woman who wears a hijab who is stopped for A quote unquote random check at the San Diego Airport on her way to Comic Con And it really just shows how she's just an average woman trying to get to Comic Con But she's still being treated differently because of her hijab and her religion and the way she looks in the country.

She's from the one that's currently on the festival circuit is called lying [00:40:00] is complicated and it's about it's actually, that one's actually a proof of concept for my feature film, bad BFF. So I will tell you first what bad BFF is about. Bad BFF is about a woman who pretends she's getting married in order to get her best friend.

To hang out with her as the maid of honor. So it's a story about female friendship and how women can get left behind when their friends go off. To start families and do the whole marriage thing. So again, as I said earlier, really focused on, you know, being a single woman, and validating that lifestyle choice.

So the short film is a proof of concept taken from that, which is basically about a, about the same woman trying to convince her fake fiance to go to dinner with her to keep up the ruse.

Maria Burton: And I would just like to co sign that I have read that script and it is, laugh out loud, hilarious.

Monique Sorgen: Thank you, Maria.

I love you. And I did not pay [00:41:00] her for that, although I would.

Julie Harris Oliver: Okay, maria,

what do you have to go?

Maria Burton: So I have been spending much of the last few years shadowing on different television shows through the studio programs, working to get my episodic break But then this summer, when we were in this prolonged couple strikes, I decided I'd need to go back to doing some of my independent features because ironically, that's something I have a little more control over.

aNd I was invited to the NASA launch in earlier this spring of one of the commanders or the commander of this launch up to the international space station is a fan of the project and invited me down. And the launch kept getting pushed. And so I spent a lot of time at NASA with different astronauts and they were all saying, you've got to make this movie now because we're going to have a woman on the moon in 2025.

And the mercury 13 is the story of the women who were tested to be [00:42:00] astronauts in the early sixties. It's the same time as hidden figures, but it's like the women who were the right stuff at that time. And the script has won a lot of awards. It's been optioned a number of times, but it's been a little bit on the back burner while I've been focusing on episodic.

So that has come back to the front burner and I am making progress on that and very excited.

Julie Harris Oliver: Exciting. Okay. Susan.

Susan Dynner: Oh, I've been very busy besides obviously gen X, X, I have several projects. I was Casting one right before the pandemic called Fall of Eden, which is a story that follows three women whose lives unexpectedly intertwine.

One is a 15 year old from South Central whose crush turns into a nightmare. One is a 19 year old runaway punk rock girl living in the streets of Hollywood who's reunited with the lost love. And one is a 29 year old law student who has discovered that the law is not just. So that was starring Dylan McDermott and Brianna Hildebrand and I get, I'm excited to get back into casting that now that the strike is over.

I just wrapped shooting [00:43:00] on a proof of concept for a feature called The Soul Trader, which stars Shane West and Donna Mills and Shawna Grace, and we're very excited about that. The writer just finished the feature version of the script, so we're going to be going out with that shortly and doing the festival circuit.

Also I am currently shooting a documentary about women in magic, as I mentioned. I'm a magician member of the Magic Castle, so this is my community and my other passion. And I'm really excited about it for everyone to meet these extraordinary women and men who support them. And with that, I should also mention which NXX, we really appreciate like all of our male allies and younger allies, I mean, it takes a village.

And we should mention, it's not just us doing this alone. We have an amazing advisory board that's there to help us. We. Met with countless people who have been supportive and generous with their time and energy. So, That's also something that we should definitely mention. But yeah,

Julie Harris Oliver: I love it.

Nandi. What are

you up to?[00:44:00]

Nandi Bowe: I am developing a series based on my real life When I moved myself and three kids with my husband to india Soon after my diagnosis of ms He was offered a job opportunity and I felt like I just didn't know what else to do during that time. I wrote a book, and I'm developing a series that stars Tiffany

Haddish based on that story.

Julie Harris Oliver: What's the book called?

Nandi Bowe: Well, the book is called Hollywood to Bollywood, but I think I'm changing the name, and the

series will be called Nandi.

Julie Harris Oliver: Is the book out? Can we read it?

Nandi Bowe: No,

I'm going through the editing process now. I didn't know how to write a book when I wrote it. And I, in fact, I sort of paid one of my kids to, to read through, well, to, to count words in books to find out how many words a book was a book.

So, I have more words than I need, and so I'm in the editing process right now.

Julie Harris Oliver: What is some [00:45:00] advice that you would leave us with for women coming up in the business? Nandi, can, we start

with you.

Nandi Bowe: I guess it would be the same advice that I give myself on a regular basis, which is just to follow your heart and keep pushing and find allies.

I mean, that's what GenXX is a group of allies and just found find allies in the business. Find ways to keep yourself inspired and to continue telling the stories that move you regardless.

Susan Dynner: Yeah, I agree with that. I think there's so many resources out there now that we didn't even have coming up.

You've got Sundance Collab. You've got Film Independent. You've got all these great Alliance of Women Directors, Film Fatales. All these amazing organizations that, you know, you can find your tribe, find the people that you want to work with. I love working with these three women here. I mean, they're all amazingly talented, as you can see.

I'm so glad that we, you know, we're working on this project [00:46:00] together. And also just do it. You know, you can figure out ways to just do it these days. You can take out your phone and just film. It doesn't have to be professional, just to practice and learn your craft. Great. Maria.

Maria Burton: They've said very much what I would say but just the thing about just keep filming you always develop even if You are making mistakes.

It's good to make mistakes on things that are not You know the professional thing and that's something that you can learn by doing shoots on your cell phone But that also can be a wonderful project and then you have things for your reel and those things lead to work they lead to connections that You, this is a long career and you never know how the connections that you build early on will pay off later.

Like I think Nandi is working with people she went to film school with and it all comes around. So just keep working.

Julie Harris Oliver: It's so true. It's such a small town. [00:47:00] Monique.

Monique Sorgen: So I'm the joyful cynic of the group. And I just want to say, make sure you know why you're doing this. If you're doing it for the money, you're going to be gravely disappointed.

You should quit now. This is not great. Gold rush. You know, you have to do it for the love and for the passion. And because there is literally nothing else you can think of doing. Almost every other job out there is easier than this one. So you really have to be honest with yourself about that. But if you do find this is the only thing that you're happy doing.

You know, congratulations, you found your calling, you know, and then at that point, I would go to the advice that everyone else gave, just like, find your tribe, stick with it. And remember to look at what's fun about this business. Cause there are so many fun things that we get to do [00:48:00] that nobody else gets to do.

Like, you know, you don't necessarily get rich doing this, but you do get a lot of opportunities to go to free screenings and Meet people that no one else got to meet and hear from the pros and connect with the pros. And sometimes you even get to work with the pros. So, you know, there's a lot of fun to be had, but first make sure you're here for the right reasons and that you're not wasting your time.

And also, by the way, one other thing, a lot of people start out wanting to direct and in the process fall in love with something else. Let yourself fall in love with acting if that's who you are. Let yourself fall in love with production design. Let yourself fall in love with makeup if you find out that you actually like that more.

I mean, there are so many jobs to be done here and a lot of people really learned along their path where they actually belonged.

Julie Harris Oliver: Really good advice. And could you say where to find GenXX again?

Susan Dynner: You can find it online at [00:49:00] GenXX. info. And

Monique Sorgen: at the bottom of the page there, you can sign up to be on our mailing list and you'll be kept, you know, abreast of anything we're doing, whether we're doing talks or panels.

We're going to have a launch party. We have not officially launched yet, so we're going to have a launch party. You'll be invited to that. You know, sign up at the bottom of the page and we'll keep you. informed about whatever is going on when we're going to be rolling out our next, you know, fellowship opportunity and all of that.

All right. All right.

Julie Harris Oliver: I can't wait to see what you all do. I want to thank you all for doing this. Nandi Bowe, Maria Burton, Susan Dynner, Monique Sorgen. Thank you.

Maria Burton: Thank you.

Susan Dynner: Thank you.

Julie Harris Oliver: You've been listening to The Other 50 percent A Herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. Thank you to Maria Burton, Susan Dynner, Monique Sorgen, and Nandi Bowe for the conversation and for telling us all about Gen XX.

You can find them at GenXX. info. And [00:50:00] special thanks to Jay Rowe, Dani Rosner, and Alison McQuaid for the music. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and rate and leave a review to help other people find it. You can reach me at julieharrisoliver at gmail. com. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

EP 234: Emily Best

Introduction and Update on Julie's Accident

[0:00] Hi friends, you're listening to The Other 50%, a herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. You may have noticed I took a little bit of a break over the summer.

The truth is I had a bit of an accident and I broke my wrist and I had to have surgery and I need those particular parts of me to put this podcast together.

And to be honest, the whole thing just took me out for a bit but not to worry, I'm fine, I'm recovering. Sometimes we just need a season to rest and recuperate.

The only thing I regret is that I did this interview back in June, and now I've taken a long time to get it out. But here we are. I'd like to think it's worth the wait, and I also think it's pretty evergreen.

I caught up with Emily Best, the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, the online crowdfunding platform for creators, and also FilmForward, which is an experiential learning platform designed to activate the full potential of today's dynamic and diverse workforce by replacing boring corporate training videos with a cinematic learning experience built around award-winning short films from around the world. I've seen this program, it is so cool, and she's going to tell us about it.

[1:03] One of the things I love about this business, and I guess about life, is getting to see how people's careers develop and how they grow and evolve. I interviewed Emily a few years ago about Seed&Spark and her origin story and all things crowdfunding on Catch a Break Season 2, Episode 203, so be sure to go and listen to that, and it is linked in the show notes.

But today, I initially reached out to Emily to talk about her newer venture, Film Forward, and the important work she's doing there.

Our conversation expanded to include her thoughts about managing a company with a dispersed and remote workforce and how COVID changed everything, about really intentionally creating culture in a company in those circumstances, how humbling it is to do this work authentically, and trying to shift the American culture to prioritize human dignity above individual achievement.

Emily continues to be an incredibly thoughtful visionary, and I was inspired by this conversation.

You can find the podcast at theotherfiftypercent.com, all spelled out in letters, as well as in all the podcast places, and or you can find the links to everything I'm up to on the link tree that is in the show notes.

Okay, here's my conversation with Emily Best. Here, have a listen.

Introduction and Overview of Seed&Spark

[2:16] I'm here with Emily Best. Welcome to The Other 50%. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to catch up with you. And I'm not going to have you go through your whole origin story and the whole origin story of Seed&Spark because I talked to you for a really long time on the Catch a Break podcast, episode 203. So I encourage everyone to go listen to that, to get up to speed, and then come back and get the update. So, gosh, there's so many things I want to talk to you about and why don't we just do a quick update on where Seed&Spark is right now, because that's the film crowdfunding platform. And I saw something recently where you've eliminated the fees and everything. So why don't you talk about Seed&Spark and tell us where it is?

Well, we launched Seed&Spark back in 2012. And back then the market was dominated by the two major players, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and they've set the rate and set the fees and set how things were done. And we updated a little bit by making it possible for pledgers on Seed&Spark to cover the site fee on behalf of the creators. And that meant that the creators were paying less in site fees and keeping more of their cash. But the more that we looked at the landscape.

[3:25] The biggest player in crowdfunding now is really GoFundMe. That's the one that's because it has replaced the American healthcare system, but that is a tragedy for another podcast.

Right. It's a whole other story.

But now, pretty much everyone has, you know, back when we started Kickstarter and Indiegogo were still like kind of cool, newfangled, not super well known, like, you know, your creator friends knew what they were, but their parents didn't, you know, and now GoFundMe has become a really like intergenerational, everybody's familiar with it, not for good societal reasons, as I mentioned, but they, they're a for profit business and they get a tip.

[4:05] And I was realizing that the main ways people are interacting with digital crowdfunding now, which are political contributions, and GoFundMe, they're being asked to leave a tip.

And that's actually more familiar now to folks than a lot of the other frameworks and creators, like they don't really have much money to spare. So could we move into that model?

And we figured out that like at worst it would basically be.

An even swap from a revenue perspective. And at best, if we do a really good job of articulating our value to our backers, we could do better.

And so January of last year, we removed fees from our creators and we moved to a tipping model with backers.

How's it going?

Yeah, it's break-even or better, actually. And I think what's interesting is that people who are inclined to tip are actually inclined to tip like 20%.

And that's very different from the 5% of before. And then that puts the onus on us to really articulate the value. And I think that's like an appropriate relationship for us to have.

Yeah. And then the creators get more of the money to put on the screen, as they say.

[5:25] Now, I also know you relocated your business to Atlanta. Can you talk about why and how that's going?

Relocating to Atlanta and Remote Work Dynamics

[5:30] I mean, yes, I relocated the business, but I relocated myself to Atlanta.

My team is now everywhere and we had an office in downtown LA until March 2020.

We shut it down a few days before the broader national shutdown. Basically when I saw people disinfecting doorknobs, I was like, let's go home. This is ridiculous. I'm going to move here. And then the shutdown soon followed.

We gave up our office pretty soon after that. And then we, over the next year and a half, we hired from everywhere.

[6:03] And at that point, like, it was clear we were never going back to an office.

And my husband and I had, I didn't, no shade, I didn't particularly enjoy living in Los Angeles.

It just isn't my spot. And we went and moved up to be near my parents during the pandemic in Sacramento and had a little bit more of like a quiet, calm, suburban existence.

Husband had to give up everything he was doing. He's an actor. He also is a really skilled personal trainer, does a lot of like, you know, healing and mobility work with folks.

And none of that was happening in person. And I was trying to rescue Seed and Spark from certain extinction. And so he became full time dad. And he stayed with two small kids. And he stayed, that way until three weeks ago when he went back to work full time. But moving to Atlanta gave him an opportunity to, without going back to LA, to still participate in the entertainment industry. So we got back here, he got an agent, he started auditioning again, then the strike happened. So he was like, okay, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm gonna go get some, some training work, which is what he's doing now. But part of it was, it's affordable to live here.

[7:14] If you are a person who is very interested in your kids going to public school and then also interested in your kids going to diverse public school and also in your kids going to diverse public school where there's enough resources to actually create good educational outcomes, you don't actually have that many choices in the entire country.

Yeah. But Gwinnett County, which is the largest county in Georgia, we managed to find a house, a walking distance from the most diverse public school in the state of Georgia, in one of the most diverse counties in America. And that was really important to us. So entertainment was one, education for the kids, affordable housing. We wanted enough space to grow things and we wanted a climate in which we could feel like we've responsibly grown them. Like, I know that California is having a record weather year, but it's not actually curing the drought and it's exacerbated a lot of really longstanding climate issues. And we we're looking for a slightly more stable piece of land where water fell out of the sky in reasonable intervals, where we could grow things and just live a little bit more of a sustainable existence.

And so that's what we've done.

[8:26] I love it. I'm such a proponent of public school. And- I love public school.

Yeah, I think it's so important. And we can talk about diversity all day long, but then if we keep our white children in these really expensive private schools, we're undermining the whole effort, but don’t get me started.

That's what private schools were built for, was to keep the white kids with the white kids. So that's what you get when you go there.

By design. Yes. Well, along the way, it seems that you've proven you can run a company with a diverse, diverse isn't the word I was looking for, although also that, but you can run a company- Distributed.

Yes, thank you. You're welcome.

The Benefits of Working from Home and Accessibility Accommodations

[9:09] Can you talk about that a bit? In a time where there's a lot of pressure to bring people back to the office and I'm having trouble figuring out why.

Well, bringing people back to the office in a forced way is sexist and ableist.

I'm just going to go ahead and say that, because the accessibility accommodations that were created almost overnight at the top of the pandemic so that people could work from home were things that disability activists had been screaming to make available for decades. And they were like, oh, so it was that easy. How interesting. Yeah. Suddenly it wasn't hard.

Yeah. When it really got her to the bottom line. Right. And so for me, the idea of going back to the office with all that we have gained from it in mobility, people being able to move where they want to move, you know, live the lifestyles they want to live, I think is really important. I think, three years in, I am having some major aha moments about assumptions that I held onto around how work would still be even though we were distributed, especially as the team changed. And And we didn't have trust that was built in person.

And the idea that, distributed work requires so much more attention to process and practice.

The Challenges of Remote Work and Communication Overload

[10:38] Because you can't learn things by osmosis. Just follow someone around and hear your leader talk and figure it out.

Exactly, and because conflict will get, conflict that might happen in a meeting gets resolved just between the two people and then you don't get to see them talking at the water cooler later and knowing then getting like a visual cue that like, oh, that's been resolved and feeling that relief. There are just a whole lot of community and like.

[11:07] It's also annoying because things that could be like, hey, over your shoulder, let me ask you this thing, become a meeting, or a Slack message or whatever.

I think the inundation of communication is really intense and it drove a ton of burnout that I couldn't explain because everybody's like, you're working from home, how could you be burned out?

It's like, well, no, now work in people's living rooms.

It's exhausting and constant.

[11:37] Yes, it's exhausting and constant. We have to pay way more attention to little details.

We have to do way more documentation.

We're having to learn and implement, experiment with, learn from, and implement new processes, figure out that those aren't working, or reset expectations for people who are like, I don't like this.

And you're like, yeah, well, unfortunately, we're going to have to do it anyway. And I'm sorry about that. That's a trade-off that we're making. If you want to stay home, this is now a trade-off that we're making.

It's really hard. I didn't have the skills for it. I didn't... I was not trained for it. I was learning along the way and fell on my face so many times. I'm super lucky to have a really brilliant COO who can see and has a lot more experience than I do and can really see things for what they are. And we hired some big gun outside consultants to help us work on the DEI side in the distributed environment, in the expectation setting, in the trust building. And we had to undertake a really intentional culture design that is taking literally years to implement because we also have to run this business and there aren't that many of us to run it, right? So it's been hugely challenging. And I think also challenging for me to set healthy boundaries.

And so, you know, the four-day week was something that we implemented last year.

[13:04] My gosh. Again, what's time? What is time?

About a year ago, just to try to address some of that digital burnout piece, like, Julie, I'm on 14 Zooms a day sometimes. And like, that's pretty regular. That's a lot.

You know what I mean? Like, I couldn't do it. I'd die if I had to do that five days a week.

Yeah. different level of like attentiveness and energy and all of those things.

Am I hearing a, and yet it's worth it at the end of this?

[13:35] You mean for working at home? Absolutely. Because the advantages are managing care for my kids.

The advantages are I can cook dinner. It's not just like I make it home in time for dinner, but I can cook dinner, which I love to do. For some people, I know that's a terrible chore.

For me, I love to do it. It's part of how I make a break from my day and reconnect with, with my family and myself, it allows us to hire brilliant people from absolutely anywhere.

Like I think about, this is just like one of our most recent hires is a guy named Mike Moran and he's in Rhode Island. And like, he's so stinking good at his job.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And there's no way we'd ever work, I would not know he existed otherwise and I'm so, so grateful for his work and his contributions.

And so I think about that and I think about Jade Flower in Baltimore, Maryland, like just these are unicorn humans.

Remote Work and Talent Attraction

[14:39] That like are not in Los Angeles and what we would be missing out on from a talent perspective and that the attributes of a four-day week and remote work are really attractive to folks.

[14:53] Yeah, it's brilliant. Can you talk a little bit how you think about the setting up the DEI culture of it all when, everyone's remote?

It's really hard. It's really hard. I've made a lot of mistakes.

I think the truth is like the DEI culture of it all means different things to different organizations and I have an organization where every single person in it has extraordinarily high expectations about the culture and the experience here. And there's, you know, honestly, less in like, nobody's in it for the money, right? It's not that people don't want to and deserve to be paid at whatever, but like, you don't come to work at Seed&Spark because you're like, I'm going to get wealthy, like a lot of startups. It's like, I am really mission aligned. Yeah. Right.

And so I didn't understand for a long time, because I obviously I give my heart to this thing because it's mine, but like I didn't understand the ways in which other folks also are really in it with their hearts.

And that actually is a much more delicate environment in which to work where like things that that.

[16:13] In other workplaces wouldn't even register as a blip are really significant in our workplace because people are in it with their hearts, right? So at Seed&Spark, nobody's ever been fired for disagreeing with something or... You know what I mean? You don't have that sort of thing. But people take conflict really personally because we think of ourselves as a really loving, empathetic, et cetera, place. And so conflict feels like really terrifying. And it's hard to like innovate and push and go forward and have no conflict. And when you're really trying to suppress conflict, that can create a lot of challenges. And so for us, it was really about sort of getting to the root of what are we trying to do here together? Can we really clearly define the roles that everyone is playing and the expectations for those roles. And can we make it very clear what decisions people are responsible for, which is super important in a distributed environment, what they're just a stakeholder in? Meaning you can expect to have meaningful input, but you don't get to make that call. And so the decisions that you're charged to make, you have to decide what trade-offs are being made and take responsibility for those trade-offs.

Balancing Conflict and Innovation in a Heartfelt Workplace

[17:34] In other cases, you may be mad about the trade... If you're just a stakeholder, you may be mad about the trade-offs that are being made. But it's just important that you understand why they're being made. And like this is... I'm saying this to you with language I have today that I didn't have 4, 6, 12. And so we're doing all those things. And then we're having to do them again and again as the business changes and shifts because we're a startup and stuff changes really fast. And so we are constantly having to redefine those things and also prioritize them amid all of the work that actually needs to get done.

But I have come to really believe that it's about expectation setting.

[18:11] And you do that through job descriptions. You do that through objectives and key results. You do that through... Charts that I'm having trouble thinking of the name of it. But where you're like, who's responsible, who's informed, who's a stakeholder, who's... Yeah, exactly. There are lots of really great frameworks for this that I really like. But I think at the end of the day, it's also about like demonstrating the practices, right?

So having meetings where there's an agenda and there are notes and there are action items. And that at the end of the day, everybody knows who's responsible for what action item because meetings are costly, right?

Interpersonally, making sure that people leave them being like, oh, I'm glad I was in that meeting. And I know what to do next.

Yeah, clarity is incredibly important. And it sounds like a lot of emotional labor but scaffolded by a lot of tools and clarity and steps.

Thank you for saying that. This is something that I now say to people coming into a distributed workplace that I did not know to say for like the first two years we were hiring, which is that distributed workplace requires a high degree of emotional labor.

And I learned this phrase from my friend Carla Monterosso, emotional discipline.

[19:28] Say more. Well, Number one is really getting to the, like, the emotional labor piece is trying to be really attentive to the visual cues, right?

There is digital body language, virtual body language, somebody's with their camera off or somebody's not really engaged, right? Somebody's not participating in the chat when they're asking to, et cetera.

There's digital body language that's important to acknowledge, but it's also really important when you're being triggered and you're having big feelings about something to try to actually unpack what's going on.

Accountability and Managing Triggers in Remote Work

[20:06] Before sort of really acting out in all of that reaction and being patient.

So I think the emotional discipline is really about patience with people needing to get to a place at their pace and trying to make sure that everybody has what they need to get where you go together.

And I think it's about constantly interrogating how information moves around the organization. And how accountability is practiced in the organization. But the, but accountability, real accountability is emotional labor.

Yeah, there was a part in the middle that I just felt so deeply having worked, you know, in large corporations in this remote business where there are times when you can be so triggered and the discipline of not having a rant on your Zoom.

[21:06] Is a challenge. Yeah. Yeah. I think what I've seen my, we have used a lot of practices over the months and one of our board members, who's a brilliant coach, and entrepreneur in her own right, Virginia Bauman, she gave us the framework of red, yellow, green, where you just do a little check-in with yourself And then, you know, at the beginning of a meeting, you can say, I'm green.

I'm like, I'm here. I'm present. I'm ready to go. I'm feeling good.

I'm yellow. I'm distracted or agitated, whatever. I'm red is red.

And my team, because we're artists, like have all different shades.

Importance of Acknowledging Our Protected Class Status

[21:46] Very popular. And I think in part it's because. We're a team where every single individual is in a protected class. Every single individual in our team is a member of a protected class. And so the society is not terribly friendly to us right now, in different ways at different times for different people. And we need to be able to acknowledge what we're walking into the room with.

And I have seen times when we've practiced red, yellow, green, And somebody has been like, not quite their full selves, but they said they were like orange.

So first of all, when someone says red, I'm usually like, do you need to be like, can we just take notes for you? And do you want to take time? And if they say like, no, I need to be here. I want to do work. I'm like, cool. I'm gonna respect that. But you've also told us how we need to treat what's coming out, right?

And I've watched the team like adjust around somebody who's like really trying to make it work that day.

And I've also seen times when we haven't done red, yellow, green, and things have fallen apart and we've had to repair it. And it was just, it's a really stark reminder for me of how important some of those things are when you can't literally feel someone's energy anymore.

Yeah, and you could be making up stories about the reaction that you're getting, having no idea.

Prioritizing Mental Health and Well-being in the Workplace

[23:11] Yeah. God, that is the work, isn't it? Yeah.

So we talk about this a lot in the realm of production, you know, instead of just barreling into your day, having a moment and checking in with people.

And then that step of if there are things people are dealing with, or they're not at top capacity, how do you manage that besides saying, okay, great, we're carrying on anyhow. Keep up.

You know, we have unlimited PTO and people take mental health days all the time. I don't want people to work sick and or tired. And I think the hardest lesson for me is to use that also.

Oh, you have to model it or no one will take it. Yeah, well, I mean, they, I would say everybody else the company is better at it than I am. Oh, they're doing it.

Yeah, with the exception of one person and she knows who she is and I'm constantly encouraging her to take a little bit more. But yeah, I mean, I think that piece of it too which is just building frameworks And if you know what work you're responsible for and what metrics you have to hit. We trust people's discernment to say, I'm down today, it's not gonna be worth the effort. Tomorrow when I come back, I'm gonna still hit my numbers and we move on. Because I don't think the quantity of work is important.

[24:35] Well, and that also shifts, my favorite article is that Harvard Business Review article of why there are no obstacles for incompetent white men.And the thesis is because we value Face Time, confidence, 

[24:53] Speaking up, bragging, telling us how great you are and see that as leadership and see that as productivity, when in fact it's none of those things.

And so it seems like when you're really looking at, you know, work quality and you're not having people fight for attention in a boardroom. It shifts the whole dynamic.

Yes. And I want to be clear, like, I don't think I'm killing it at this. I think I am. I am in a deep state of perpetual humility around this stuff that like, just when I think I've got it, something else comes up. And I'm like, Nope, I don't got it.

But I'm grateful that I'm, you know, I have a team that holds me accountable, which is the best thing you can ask for, because if they're not, you better wonder why.

And more than that, I'm surrounded by some really brilliant like leaders and advisors who have given me language and tools to actually tackle this and to have some awareness of the things that make me successful as a founder, are not the same skills that make me successful as a leader.

[26:05] I would argue that your humility and thoughtfulness about it is probably what makes you successful.

Maybe. I don't know what successful means, really, is in that I've messed it up royally on multiple occasions and have had to really re-evaluate my approach to things and apologize to people and, and figure it out.

And I, I feel like a perpetual beginner, but my title says I should know something about it. Right.

So, so I think there's my dog always having something to say about everything. It's the real working from home. Yeah. This is real work from home stuff. Yeah.

No, I really do feel like a perpetual beginner in many ways where I get excited is when we implement a new, you know, when I can pull something from one of these folks and we can implement it and it works is like really exciting. It's really and then you can see everybody else being like, oh retrospectives. Yeah, you know, it's like, it's awesome. It's awesome because like that's a tool they can then turn and use in their smaller teams in their meetings. And it's, it's really invigorating and I can see what it does to the energy of folks who may have been previously a little more disengaged. But I also look like Working remotely is not my dream.

Working alone vs. working with a room full of people

[27:30] This is like the truth, just speaking solely personally for me, like working alone in an office in my house, however creatively I get to decorate it, I don't like being by myself all day and I do work much better, like where my actual skill set is helping a room full of people move through some really hard ideas and big questions to action. That is actually my core capacity and And I can't do, you can't do it on Zoom in the same way.

Didn't you start WIMPs?

I did. As a salon in your house? Yes. Yeah, okay. Gathering groups of people.

[28:09] And asking really hard questions and trying to make space for people to grapple with the answers. That's what that group was about. As soon as it became sort of an organization that people were using digitally to like get jobs, I was no longer the right person to manage that.

And it really, WIMPs, Women in Moving Pictures Salon, for the people who are like, what is that?

Was literally meant to be a monthly gathering of people. And then the women in the group were like, hey, we'd really like this to be a listserv so we can hire each other and we can get help with things, and you need a rubber chicken on set Sunday morning, who's got one? That was a real request. I need somebody with expertise about sea lions.

But I mean, women were really hiring each other in droves. But once the list grew larger than the people who could meet, there was no longer mutual responsibility to one another and the mutual trust that came out of that core.

And like, I think about a lot about that as a founder that like.

[29:16] I am a zero-to-one founder. I'm like, what is the big brewing challenge here? And how can we, as a group of people, come to a really cool next solution? And how can we build some community around that? But the organizational piece is not my zone of genius. And so I learn it because it is my responsibility. But it's not what I bring to the table. You know what I mean?

[29:42] Are you able to do some of those gatherings? Yeah.

So we I tried to get together with team members and the team is awesome. Like they make efforts if they're traveling to see each other as well. You know, we just don't have the budgets to bring 20 people together from all over the country. That's the thing about is like, if we could get together on a quarterly or even semiannual basis without thinking twice about it, I think it would feel really different than it does today.

Something for early stage startups to really consider is that like, fine, hire people in 10 states, but what does it cost to like fly and put them up to get them together? It's not insignificant. Yeah. And if you don't have that budget, you're making a pretty significant trade off. And those are things that like, I didn't, I didn't think were priority to think about for a while. And so now we find ways around them, you know, like we travel, we meet at festivals for work events and you know, we do it in smaller groups. Sure. Now, Can we shift a bit and talk about FilmForward?

Prioritizing in-person gatherings for remote teams

[30:41] I remember seeing your presentation on it and I think it's such an exciting thing and I talk about it to whoever will listen. So why don't you tell us about what FilmForward is?

[30:49] Sure. FilmForward replaces boring, crappy corporate professional development training with experiential learning programs built around some of the world's best short cinema.

[31:02] And the genesis of FilmForward was from our creators. is that like around 2018, Seed&Spark had been in market for six years and we had tried to do all sorts of things around film distribution to try to connect our creators.

[31:18] To larger and larger audiences. But our creators came to us and they were like, hey, so now no matter how successful we are, we can get picked up by a big distributor out of a big festival, we are marketed on social media and we are streamed on streaming platforms. And the reviews written about us are distributed through digital media platforms.

And so everything about us and every delivery mechanism that we're put out through is being delivered via algorithm, like a heat seeking missile to people who already look like us and already think like us. And that is not why we make work. We make work to change people's minds and challenge their worldview.

Identifying the challenge of delivering films to diverse audiences

[31:56] And I remember where I was standing when the enormity of this problem actually hit me. And I was like, aha, okay. So the challenge is how do we deliver films to audiences at scale? Audiences who don't identify as the audience for the work in any digital way. And we can't really use social media or streaming because those are all using algorithms. Cool. What? How? And a really smart advisor of mine said, Emily, did you know the workplace is the most diverse place most people are in their lives? I was like, oh, that's really interesting.

But we didn't, you know, we'd been a crowdfunding marketplace for six years, like we didn't know from enterprise. And so we did a six-month research project and we talked to hundreds and hundreds of enterprise leaders. So primarily in the C-suite, chief diversity officers, people, I like to talk to CFOs, so you know how the money moves in an organization. We talked to employee resource group leaders and consultants and academics.

[33:05] And you know, the number one thing we heard, the easiest piece of information we could glean is nobody likes corporate training videos or believes they're particularly effective.

Not. And many times in the category of professional development, the framework was perpetuating harm, because it was sort of like giving people a certificate for things they were not ready to practice and hadn't been given the opportunity to practice. Or in the case of DEI, it was relying a lot on getting groups of people together for brave conversations that they were not prepared or resourced to have. And then the marginalized folks in the room were being asked to perform their trauma for their colleagues so that the like white or straight or cis or male, colleagues in the room would empathize.

[33:53] Then those folks felt good about themselves. And the marginalized folks would be like, cool, that's not gonna change anything.

And now my emotional labor has been used for the benefit of my white colleagues. I'm like, what did I get out of this? And this was actually sowing division. And we were like, well, that's a really cool problem to solve because we use movies for collective sense-making all the time. And in fact, all the other challenges we were really hearing them talk about, right?

So organizational adaptability and resilience to globalization or global markets or global audiences, retention and engagement of employees because we needed to develop more psychologically safe mechanisms in the workplace, leadership, just as a category, leadership.

These are all actually like stories that we tell about how we do things here, right?

Yeah. And we use films for collective sense-making all the time, but because of the algorithmification, it's definitely really hard to have a water cooler around which we can all gather and talk about one thing we've all seen.

[34:59] And so we started with this sort of idea that we're gonna bring the water cooler conversation back with a purpose, but we realized that we had to go far beyond just making better video experiences, that actually we needed to engage a very different theory of change, that moved people from experience.

Scaling practice from individuals to teams and creating organizational accountability

[35:23] Through like framework understanding to action and lasting practice behavior change. And that couldn't happen just at the individual level. It needed to, we needed individuals to have experiences and reflection and frameworks so that they could actually map this stuff into their brains in the way that it would stick.

We needed to scale that practice into teams.

And then we needed to create some organizational accountability This we do through executive insight data that actually helps organizations understand where their policies, practices, and structures are impeding professional development in the organization.

Okay, so many layers to that. Because a big part of it sounds like the shared experience and the shared agreement of what we saw means. Yeah, that's right.

And then how we're going to use that to affect change and hold ourselves accountable.

Love it. Can you give us an example?

Sure. We have this really incredible Norwegian short film called The Affected. And The Affected takes place on an airplane, on a tarmac. It's a crowded airplane, a busy tarmac.

[36:34] And off camera, so you're spending a little bit of time with the pilot and the stewardesses, and I don't know, you call them flight attendants, and you're sort of traveling around with different passengers. And then off camera, you can hear a woman stand up and starting to to protest that somebody on the plane is going to be deported and she won't sit down until this person is moved to safety. And so this protest is happening and now you're traveling back through and listening to how they all react. And the captain has to make a decision, and he's like, just, you know, tell her to get off the plane, whatever we, you know, we got to go. And you see this whole thing deteriorate and the captain makes a decision that his first mate or whatever that guy's called supports or ostensibly supports. And, then as it's clear that was like a very unpopular decision, the first mate says, well, I never agreed with it.

Now corporate is calling, right? And the captain gets ousted off the plane and replaced by somebody who makes a very magnanimous statement about how I have decided to stop the deportation, which is not something an individual captain can do.

And then it becomes clear over the credits that the airline is just moving this person to the next flight to try to ameliorate the problem. And it's 11 minutes. And at the end of it, we can ask really interesting conversations about accountability.

Conversations about accountability and the cost of masking in the workplace

[37:53] Who is accountable for the decision-making? What tools did they have available? What mistakes did they make? And you also get all the different perspectives on what's happening from the people on the airplane. My favorite question that we open a lot of our discussions with is like, who are you?

[38:10] In the film. Yeah, who are you in the film? And it's just absolutely fascinating what opens up because I think actually it's less important that we necessarily have a shared meaning about what happens, but that people start to hear, the very different perspectives people have about what happened based on their lived experience.

And so it is a practice of perspective taking, which is super important to building any sort of like shared agreement or innovation or anything like that. And it starts to allow people to be like, Oh, wow, that person comes from a very different vantage point than I do. And they revealed something to me that I never otherwise would have seen.

The next time I'm in a meeting and they're saying something that feels out of left field to me, I'm going to be like, no, that comes from just a very different vantage point and I'm going to dig in, there. Right.

So it's really about using films as a very safe place to learn some of these pretty hard relational skills.

[39:11] Yeah, the asking of the questions, because my first thought would be, oh, well, that would very quickly devolve into an argument about immigration, which- Yeah, we don't go there.

That part is so much less important than really talking about who was holding the decision-making power and why were people's decisions what they were and yeah, do you know what I mean?

Yeah. the discussion part of it is so important. And your platform is both, right?

You share the film and then you have, is it modules about it and then also in-person discussion?

But usually we do, the most typical engagement is six to 12 learning modules and most companies roll them out at the rate of a module a month.

[40:01] And then, and a module is a film and a set of reflection questions and then frameworks and actions and tools and resources.

So you can learn a lot of things and we will usually charge you with some behavior experiments for the next month that we check on subsequently.

And then every two modules, we do a facilitated session to unpack across two films.

And part of that is to really dig at the intersections of experience, right?

So that like, we're not just talking in this case about immigration, and it really wasn't so much about immigration as like, what was everyone experiencing on that airplane and what were their perspectives on it?

But in that same session, we're also talking about an incredible film about a young trans woman.

[40:51] Who is working in her father's auto body shop and masking her true gender because the place is called Miller and Son.

And that is really about inclusive communication.

It is about the, like, what is it to feel psychologically unsafe in a workplace? What is it to have to mask? What is the cost of that, right? There's some really powerful pieces in there.

And so you layer that in with conversations about accountability, and now you have a really interesting and rich landscape for people to start to understand what the connections are between these issues and how they relate to the, we'll call it the DEI of it all, because what we're really talking about are like, what are the skills we need to have, like an actually effective and psychologically safe workplace?

[41:40] And the DEI of it all is like, how do we just learn as a baseline to respect the humanity of people who are different from us? That's what it is, why is it so hard?

The lack of human dignity as a foundational value in American culture

[41:53] Because human dignity is not a foundational value in American culture.

Say more. Individual achievement is our foundational value. Human dignity is not a foundational value. We don't assign people dignity at birth. They have to earn it through their hard work and their wealth and their, then their performances.

And usually they have to earn it much more if they are born poor and or black and or any degree of difference from the like, you know, white patriarchal sort of perfection.

And because if human dignity were a foundational value, we would not tolerate one child shot by a gun. We would not tolerate one unhoused person. We wouldn't tolerate it. We would not be able to imagine that was possible.

But instead, it's like, well, if it infringes on my individual liberty or my individual achievement, that's on you.

So yeah, I think the reason that we have to train it in the US is because it's not foundational. And unfortunately we outsource everything to the private sector.

[43:03] And so trying to make a shift in our human values as part of what we're outsourcing to the private sector because the lack of value of human dignity is materially impacting our productivity.

[43:17] And if what you really value is productivity, you might think differently about why DEI exists. And I don't personally believe that we're on this planet to produce work output. That's actually not my fundamental feeling, but I'm like, is that the lever we have, to get people to really prioritize the work of human dignity? Fine, that's a lever I would use.

Yeah.

I think Film Forward is genius. Cause we know entertainment shapes culture and we know what a powerful tool it is in every aspect of our lives. And so then to use it in that way, I just think it just makes it so accessible and in a way that people will engage and not do something else while the Zoom is on.

How is it performing?

I didn't really know what to compare it to because I've never launched a SaaS company before, but my understanding is everybody says like, oh, getting to a million in ARR is nearly impossible.

We did it in like 16 months. Well done.

And that's less of the excitement of the value then that our existing clients are constantly expanding with us and wanting to roll out new curricula and wanting us to solve other organizational challenges that we're like, we'll get there, we need some time.

But I think for me, the most exciting piece of it is these really small aha moments where you can see people's perspective has meaningfully shifted.

[44:45] It's this incredible film. It was crowdfunded on Seed&Spark. It was nominated for an Oscar, and now it's one of the core pieces of one of our best-selling curricula, which is called Behaviors of Belonging. And it's a film about this beautiful little one-night friendship struck up between an unhoused young man and a deafblind man who enlists his help to get on a bus. And And that is the film we use to introduce the concept of privilege to people.

And there's nobody working in a modern workplace who can watch that film and come out the other side and be like, I don't have any privilege. I don't get it.

[45:27] Yeah. And so we'll see people be like, I used to think the concept of privilege meant that you didn't work for what you had. But now I see that actually it's real and that it operates and I'm going to be more mindful of that in the future. And like, that's actually a million mile leap for someone, right? Because they've shifted from fixed mindset to growth mindset.

And we see these over and over again.

One of my favorite things is the CEO of one of the companies we work for said, I took one of the films home and watched it with my kids and it opened up a conversation about, race in our family that we've never had before.

And I just get chills. I get chills every time I tell that story, because it's like, the other thing I think is actually happening with Film Forward is people are being reminded of why art is important, and that it's important everywhere.

It's not just important after 7 p.m. or on the weekends, it's important everywhere. It can be valuable all the time. And that like, the work of artists is not limited to entertainment. It's not limited to free time, it's actually essential work.

Personal Relationships and the Political Landscape

[46:37] Right, for people's interpersonal relationships in their families, in their workplaces, right, with themselves. And that's the piece of the work that gets me out of bed every day.

Yeah. I could just listen to you talk all day, swear to God. I wanted to revisit a conversation that we had before we turned on the recorder, because I think it's also important if we could just recreate that conversation. Because we were talking about, I was telling you how my husband lives in Tennessee and we have a lot of talk about do we stay in Tennessee or how much time are we gonna spend there considering the political landscape and the vulnerable people in our family? And is that a compatible thing?

And everyone is uncomfortable being there. And you were talking a bit about living in your neighborhood in Atlanta. Go.

[47:24] Oh, well, listen, I think, look, I have the privilege of mobility, right?

So my family could pick up and live in a lot of places And we have a lot of privilege of choice right now. Our kids are small, we're done having children. And so we can kind of weather some of the, more fascist policies that are being rolled out in red states.

And that's, you know, that's privilege that we have. And we moved here because we wanted to enroll our kids in a really diverse public school system that we felt like that was well-resourced and like. That's hard to find anywhere in the nation. It happens to exist in Gwinnett County, which is the largest county in Georgia. My son goes to the most diverse school in the state.

[48:14] And it's a really sweet elementary school and we love it here.

[48:18] And moving here has brought so many good things to our lives. We moved primarily because we work in entertainment. Atlanta is a good entertainment town. But I'm also working in the corporate sales side and Atlanta is a huge corporate town. And climate, you know, this is a really like climate stable place. We can grow things, we can afford to buy a house, which we couldn't, at any point at any time in California, nor any time in the future. And when we moved here, like the really regressive laws hadn't started passing, right? So we moved here, I think with a little bit with stars in our eyes, not realizing how quickly things were going to deteriorate post the overturn of Roe v. Wade. And that said, I live on a really interesting cul-de-sac where some of the original, this whole cul-de-sac was built in the 70s.

And a couple of the original owners still live here. My neighbor, Bill, he's 95. And my neighbors down the street, whose names I will leave out because of what I'm about to say. access on the internet?

Interacting with Neighbors Holding Conflicting Beliefs

[49:23] Bill's probably not hanging out with me. But our neighbors at the end of the street have been here since the 70s. They're in their 80s. They're a really lovely and kind and generous and thoughtful couple that really cares about the neighborhood.

And I didn't have a chance to really know that about them because when I moved here, they were flying an American flag and a Confederate flag. And I was like, well, I'm not gonna really spend more time with them.

And Bill's caretaker, who is a black woman in her

[49:52] I don't know, early 50s, probably, like, I, she was one of the first people I met in the neighborhood. And I was like, alright, give me the skinny.

Like, what's up? How does it feel? You know? And she was from California originally, also. And I was like, like, what's up with those people down the street?

She's like, you know what, they're really kind people. And I was like, what's up with the flag? And she's like, you know, sort of shrugged her shoulders and was like, you know, it doesn't seem to impact how they treat people. And I thought, well, that's very interesting.

It's not what I would expect. And then my husband got in a conversation with that neighbor. And because the kids were playing at the end of the cul-de-sac.

And he was saying, you know, when we moved here in the 70s, it was all young families and it was all white families. And now, and he sort of gave an inventory of the diversity of the block. And my husband was like, oh my God, where is this going? And the man says, you know, it's really changed. It's much more diverse, all for the better, I think.

[50:44] Said the guy with the Confederate flag. The guy with the Confederate flag.

My husband and I were like, the cognitive dissonance is shattering. And then, like, a really, the loveliest, they've become like family to us, a gay couple down the street moved in with their adopted son. And, you know, the dynamics of the neighborhood shifted enough. And, um, it's sort of weirdly seemed to intersect with our latest election here in Georgia, which we had another close call, the Confederate flag came down and the Georgia state flag went up. And I really believe that one of his kids or somebody in the neighborhood was like, hey, don't think you're signaling what you mean to be signaling. Because if what you're signaling is like pride of place, you're doing it in a way that's not really going to jive for everyone else in the neighborhood. And I think the Georgia state flag is probably closer to what he means.

But what I think is like fascinating is, and you said this earlier, you know, Michelle Obama says it's hard to hate someone up close. What he really cares about is neighborliness.

[51:57] Do you know what I mean? Like he talks about himself as sort of like the protector of that end of the cul-de-sac. And we got the guy up here who has a thin blue line flag in his front yard, who's the protector of his part of the cul-de-sac. And they are really good neighbors to an extraordinarily diverse group of people.

And so it's really confusing to me how they hold these two things side by side.

And also it's really interesting to me to actually witness incremental change, even in the people that we will be like, ah, you know, it was a different time. You know, yeah, we, there's a real ageism in the growth mindset piece, right? That like, oh, you know, he's never gonna change his ways. And I just like, I saw it happen. Yeah.

[52:48] You know? And so part of it is that, you know, growing up in a liberal bubble, my first instinct was always - a Confederate flag, I'm not gonna build a relationship.

Right, right, I'm out.

[52:57] Yeah, and it gives me no opportunity to actually offer perspective that can make things different.

And I've witnessed that with my, you know, my neighbor's kids who are on the real, neighbors, the kids, they're like in their 70s now. But they're, they have a really different political affiliation, but they, and they were not like, particularly sweet to us when they found out we were from California. I think one of them was like, Oh, we think everybody from California is crazy.

And I was like, sure, is that hospitality because I feel like that was aggressive. But over time, you know, we care for Bill and we bring him food and we make him birthday cakes and my daughter goes to visit and keep some company.

And I think we are doing some deprogramming because I can see how very differently they consider us and consider our ideas when we have, you know, conversations about harder topics.

[53:59] I can get them to agree around points of human dignity and what our culture might look like if human dignity were at the center, right?

And they can really nod their heads and agree with that. And like, I don't think that's necessarily being talked about in their circle. And it only happens if we just step up to have those conversations. And as white people in this country who have that, you know, capacity to move around, I'm going to say this, as white cis straight people.

[54:28] I need to be specific. Let's be very specific, yeah. Yeah.

As white cis straight people, we have a lot of capacity to move around and have these conversations and there's a neighbor on our block who is trans and when the laws started changing down here, we put up a flag to make sure that it was very clear that there's safety here.

And I think that was a demand of this place that I sort of imagined but I didn't really know what it was gonna be like. Yeah. And this is also the work. It's personal and it's one on one.

And it and it's also Sarah Silverman show where she would go into red states and red families and talk to them and humanize ideas and people. Yeah. 

What have I not asked you about that I should have asked you about?

Hold on, I have no idea what anybody wants to know from me at this point.

No, this has been a really interesting conversation. I mean, I think overall, in the course of the questions that you're asking, I realized like I've had to really go back to beginner's mindset because it turned out like I never actually knew the stuff I needed to know at all, because I didn't know I needed to know it.

Until you did. Because I was swimming in the water of white supremacy and that told me like I was fine.

[56:59] Yeah. Right? And so like I can talk about experiences I've had and like lessons I've learned, but it's like practicing and trying and failing every single day in many ways, and then trying to pick myself back up again.

And it has required a level of grace with myself that is very hard for me to muster.

And also a level of like really being comfortable, being uncomfortable that like, I can't attach myself to the idea that everybody's gonna think I'm great at this.

[57:36] Because they don't, they won't, I'm not. and that can't be my goal.

Well, and it feels like a shift to me of...It's not a period of time that we're going to feel uncomfortable and be working this out.

This is just the new normal.

Correct. Because this work isn't going to be done next week.

Correct. Well, I think I would love for us to work towards a society in which, we think more about how to create, this is the human dignity piece, how to create, a sense of comfort and autonomy and connection.

Struggling to Articulate the New Paradigm

[58:16] From the beginning as opposed to having to talk about shared discomfort and inclusion, meaning you're still just inviting people to a table that wasn't theirs originally.

And we have just, there's a real big distance between here and there. Between imperative work and the new paradigm.

Yeah, and I feel like we're still really struggling to articulate what that new paradigm might be. There's no effing political leadership. I mean, that's not true. There is very little political leadership that we can point to that really shows us that.

I don't wanna say none, because I can think of like seven people I would actually point to, but that's not what the sort of national stage is.

That's not what the national paradigm is. And so we are, like all things that we do in this country, is rather than doing systems work, right?

Rather than making massive sweeping corporate level climate change, we're just having individuals recycle. Yeah. That is so useless. Yeah, we're not tackling the corporate plastic usage on a systems level because what we value is individual determination.

Individuals are then responsible for solving these big social challenges and that's a perfect way to get them to break down and give up. And never do it.

[59:36] It. Yeah. So like, I'm feeling all of that all the time. Yeah.

Okay. Give me one of your self care things that you're doing to keep going and not burning out.

[59:48] I took a generative writing class for the last six months. It's been one of the best things I've ever done in my whole life.

What does that mean? So rather than a writing class where you're bringing things in and getting critiqued and trying to work on productive output, it's really just building a practice of writing, getting used to sharing your work, getting feedback that is actually the stuff that you're looking for, building a relationship to your own writerliness. And yeah, it's gotten me back in touch with the fact that movies are not actually my creative medium. Short fiction is my creative medium. And I think once you get into the movie business, every story you tell has to become a script. And I got reminded sometime late last year by a dear friend that like, you know, you can just write short stories. And I was like, I can? And it turns out, yeah, I can. And I am, and I do, and it feels great.

So you're getting back in touch with being an artist, which is what started this whole thing at the very beginning. That's right. That's great. 

Emily Best, I love talking to you. Oh, I love talking to you too. Thank you so much, Julie. I really appreciate your time.

[1:00:54] You've been listening to The Other 50%, a Herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver.

Thank you to Emily Best for the conversation and for sharing her story.

Special thanks to Jay Roewe, Dani Rossner, and Alison McQuaid for the music. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and rate and leave a review to help other people find it.

You can find me at julieharrisoliver@gmail.com or find me at physical therapy.

That's where I am all day every day feels like. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

EP 233: Blake Mitchell

EP 233 Blake Mitchell

Julie Harris Oliver: [00:00:00] The Catch A Break podcast is the insider's guide to breaking into and navigating the entertainment industry with me, Julie Harris Oliver Project Greenlight is a do you follow show now Streaming on Max about the making of an independent film by an emerging director on season four of Catch A Break.

These two shows meet in Catch a Break. We will bring you the behind the scenes of the behind the scenes. We'll talk to producers, the director, the cast, the department heads to hear what it was really like. Watch the show and then come listen to hear what really happened on Catch a Break wherever you get your podcasts.

That season of Catch A Break Drops on July 13th,

you're listening to the other 50% A Herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver. You can find me in my consulting work julieharrisoliver.com, and you can find the podcast at Theotherfiftypercent.com, all spelled out in letters as well as on all the podcast places. Or you can find links to everything I'm doing on the link tree that is in the show notes.

Okay. Now one more thing before we meet today's guest. Have you checked out Circling the Drain [00:01:00] yet? Okay. Remember when Don Lemon said that Nikki Haley was beyond her prime and got rightfully torched online. He may as well have said she was circling the drain. The concept of a woman circling the drain or being past or prime is absurd.

But for the host of Circling The Drain podcast, they've heard this phrase due so many times in reference to perimenopause, menopause, and the plight of the aging woman, they have chosen to reclaim and repurpose the phrase in the spirit of humor. Co-host, longtime friends, Ellie and Julia take a deep dive into the sometimes embarrassing, often hilarious, always bewildering issues of hormonal changes that take the place in midlife.

Through honest accounts, thoughtful interviews and group panel discussions, their mission is to make you chuckle, make you nod your head in recognition, and hopefully make some scientific progress. Could someone please start studying women in medicine? That would be great. Turn into Circling the Dream Podcast every other Wednesday, wherever you get your podcast.

[00:02:00] Now, today on this podcast, we have the good fortune to speak with Blake Mitchell. Blake Mitchell, they/ them began their career in film production in Los Angeles, working for the VP of Production at Participant Media. After leaving LA, they worked at Google for over eight years where they managed teams in diversity and inclusion, learning and development and recruiting.

A Georgia native. Blake moved back to the South in the fall of 2022 to work as an operations manager on Stacey Abrams campaign for governor. They recently launched their own consulting business focused on workplace diversity and inclusion and organization culture. Blake holds bachelor's degrees in international business, finance and entertainment and media studies from the University of Georgia.

Also, Blake has been performing in drag as Mary Lou Pearl, she/ her., and sees drag as a powerful tool to entertain, educate, raise money, and spread positivity. Mary Lou Pearl got her start in the drag bars and clubs of San Francisco in 2017 where she became known as a kind queen who loves giving back and spreading positivity.

[00:03:00] She spent the last two summers working in teaching drag at Brave Trails LGBTQ plus summer camp where she's returned this summer as head counselor. Now I'm going to tell you right now, drag along with gay queer trans is under attack in this country. Hardly any of the talking heads screaming about indoctrination of children have any idea what they're talking about.

So we're going to take some time today and really unpack it. What is drag actually here? Have a listen. Blake Mitchell, welcome to the other 50%.

Blake Mitchell: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Julie Harris Oliver: First of all, we should say that you are a D E I consultant, and you work with companies to bring, I imagine, equity and inclusion into their workplaces, and you also work as a drag performer.

So I wanna say upfront, for whoever's listening, we are gonna talk about this with a lot of nuance. Okay. I think there is so much need right now to really talk about things with nuance and really talk about what things actually are and talk about the history and [00:04:00] talk about the intent and, okay, so let's talk about all that stuff.

And we were, we were also talking about like the safety of it all. Cause I gotta tell you, four years ago, I did all kinds of interviews with all kinds of people. That to me, felt very risky because I was uncomfortable talking about it, like I had a dominatrix on. And I learned all about that. Mm-hmm. And this feels risky in such a different way than it did three or four years ago, cuz now it feels like it could be physically unsafe to talk about this.

And so I just want to, I wanna state that I wanna honor that and I wanna thank you for being willing to do this cuz I think it's so important that people really get educated

Blake Mitchell: about this. Yeah, absolutely. And I appreciate, I mean, first of all, thank you so much for the caring concern to even raise that and be thoughtful of it.

And you know, as we spoke about before we got started, it's something unfortunately many of us have to consider these days, given the climate of things. But. As I told a friend recently, um, I think that not going there is even more dangerous in different ways because there needs to be as much truth spouted [00:05:00] out amidst all of the, you know, lies that are being told about the queer community in this season.

So I'm very grateful to get, to have that conversation with you today and to your point, like, let's go there. We can talk about it in all levels of depth and, and confront the, the challenging edges of all of this.

Julie Harris Oliver: Okay, good. I think the people spouting nonsense are really loud and taking up all the space and it's very appropriate here we are in Pride Month and I'll do my best to get this edited and out during Pride month also.

So should we start with just what is drag?

Blake Mitchell: Yeah. You know, I think drag. It takes so many different shapes and forms. Maybe many of your listeners or many people are likely most familiar with the RuPaul's Drag Race version of Drag Super Fans, which is super fans. Yeah. Very legitimate and fun. And I think in many ways that show has brought drag performance into the zeitgeist in a way that it had not been before.

Certainly it's been around for a long time and important to a lot of people, but in terms of just exposure to wider audiences, that element, uh, which for a long time, RuPaul was [00:06:00] criticized for having. Largely cis gay men who are doing drag as women, but drag is so much more complex about the show, started to incorporate more trans and non-binary identities.

Even, uh, trans men who've been on the show now, trans women, but drag, you know, it, it's roots are complicated. There's not necessarily an easy answer, I would say, like we've seen. Examples of gender nonconforming dress and performance for thousands, hundreds of years. The current sort of drag scene really emerged out of the ballroom scene in New York and other major cities, uh, during the eighties.

Primarily. When I say ballroom, I don't mean like ballroom dancing, I mean like voguing culture and those sort of spaces that were largely led by, uh, trans women of color. And were not the drag necessarily that you see today, but. Even RuPaul got their start in that, in those spaces. And as that sort of evolved and came into the mainstream, I mean, many of us know Madonna's Vogue as like one of the moments when we really gotta look into what that, what that world meant.

It's become. More and [00:07:00] more, um, in some ways appropriated, but also, uh, many of those people have found their way into the main stage and the, the limelight, um, in a different way. And so, you know, drag, that's sort of the history and cultural context for, for me and for many, it's a playful exploration of gender, of queer identity.

It's a way to spread joy to be on stage and perform. Um, the shape that my drag has taken, uh, has been much more about educating, uplifting causes that matter to me, raising money and finding an audience and a voice through social media in addition to live performance. So it really, you know, has taken a lot of shape and I, um, always tell people when we talk about drag and Mary Lou Pearl, my drag persona that she's taught me.

So much about myself and my own identity and that sort of journey of becoming, which we can of course get into as much as I feel like I've been able to do with the tool. So,

Julie Harris Oliver: Now let's separate for the uninitiated, separate sexuality from gender from drag.

Blake Mitchell: That's an [00:08:00] excellent starting point. Thank you for Yeah, asking that.

I would say, um, and I'm, I'm fresh on explaining this cuz I came out to my parents as non-binary about a year ago. So that we've had many of these conversations as well. I would say sexual orientation, um, gay straight. By lesbian is more about who you are attracted to, who you wanna sleep with or partner with in a more romantic sense, gender identity, which I would also distinguish from sex.

So sex is what you're assigned at birth based on chromosomes, body parts that is distinct from your gender, which is how you experience that. So the way that. You feel in your own body the way that what dress makes you feel affirmed, whether you feel man, woman, something in between, neither of the two. And so it's much more your experience and all of the other things.

You know, we often attach color to gender when we talk about babies and gender reveals and things like that. So it's much more about the all the other things versus just your genetics or anatomy. Then drag for some people is just a form of [00:09:00] expression. It's a form of performance. They enjoy the theatrical element of putting on clothes that are not traditional for their gender identity.

Using that in a performative sense to pay homage to certain artists to play and have fun for some, it begins that way and then becomes an exploration of deeper things. There are many people that I am friends with who started doing drag and realize like, wow, this feels affirming from an identity perspective.

And so they've discovered. They're trans or non-binary identity through that performance. So it can lead to that. But in its core is more about the performative element of drag versus it being necessarily attached to someone's identity.

Julie Harris Oliver: Are there straight men who do drag?

Blake Mitchell: There are actually, there was for the first time on RuPaul's Drag Race, somewhat a straight identifying man who was on the show.

I would say it's traditionally associated with the queer community. But, you know, drag, uh, there's a, a quote that's been way overused, but I'm gonna use it again, uh, that RuPaul says, which is, we're all born naked and the rest is drag. And so I think [00:10:00] where I grew up outside of Atlanta, The super country dudes driving their big trucks with the big tires.

You probably see something similar in Tennessee when you're there. Um, and the camo and the hat and the whole look. There's some in LA drag. Yeah, there's some in LA that's drag too, right? It's just a different, it's it's gender performance where you're putting on this hyper masculine thing that is affirming, which is great.

And you know, so I think they're doing it in their own way. But in terms of what we think of when we say drag, I would say it's traditionally queer, but. There are plenty of, uh, there are some straight men, I would say. I know a decent number of cisgendered straight women as well who do drag and find. It is a really fun, performative element too.

And in my book, there's space for everybody, so,

Julie Harris Oliver: So when women are doing drag, and I know my questions will try to keep jamming things into boxes, which isn't appropriate, but are they doing drag as women or are they doing drag as men?

Blake Mitchell: It can be either. So sometimes there are straight or cis identifying cisgender, as you know, for [00:11:00] listeners distinct from trans.

So they identify with the gender they were assigned. So cis straight women who love the just. Amping up of their femininity and, and being sort of hyper feminine. So they, they perform as drag queens and there are a number of them who are great friends of mine that I used to perform with in San Francisco when I lived there.

Some perform as drag kings, so then they put on a more masculine, um, identity and, and do that. Some do both. And then there's of course, like people who dress up in sort of a more androgynous, not typically ascribed to either gender, just more artistic sort of form that. You know, it's just sort of their own, but it really can be either.

Julie Harris Oliver: That's, I, I'm just remembering as you're saying that I was watching one of the hearings, cuz you know, every state is doing some shenanigan right now, so. Right. All, all those hearings are on TikTok or as I call it, um, npr. But I remember a, a woman sitting in female drag talking about it, trying to educate the legislature if you really don't know what you're talking about, cuz mm-hmm.

She was a woman doing drag and you know, they're all hysterical. [00:12:00] There's so many things I wanna dig into with you cuz we wanna talk about the legislation of it all. I wanna talk about your personal journey. Shall we talk about you? Let's talk about you and your journey.

Blake Mitchell: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I, uh, grew up in a very rural community outside of Atlanta.

I claim Atlanta, but we actually live, my parents live about 45 minutes outside of Atlanta. Um, grew up on a dirt road, went to a small school, graduated high school with 13 people. So very like rural, small town. Yeah. 13 people. 13 people in my class, as far as they knew I was the first person to ever come out at that school.

Um, and it was a whole thing. And at that time I came out as gay. Uh, so I was more understanding of my sexual orientation, but it was a big deal. That was not in high school. You, you came out in high school. Yes, uh, in high school, lived in a very religious community and went to church once or twice a week growing up, which was very disruptive when I came out.

And we were ultimately asked not to go there anymore because of that and sort of cast out. Mm-hmm. There was a lot of like tough [00:13:00] edges in being in the south. As a young queer person,

Julie Harris Oliver: did they ask your whole family to stop coming to church?

Blake Mitchell: So there was a day where I had not publicly told anyone there, but I'd come out at my school and it got back.

And as I was entering the building, The, I was confronted by the pastor and the deacons who pulled me into a side room and essentially said, if you don't choose to, to deny this and not be this way, you're not welcome here anymore. And we'll, we can help you, but if you're not willing to take our help, then you're not willing to be here.

And my parents said, number one, don't pull my kid into a room and have these conversations about us here. And two, we're never stepping foot in here again if this is like, if this is what's happening. So that was the last time I was ever there.

Julie Harris Oliver: I'm sorry that happened to you and also good for your parents.

Blake Mitchell: Yeah, they had not quite figured everything out, but they knew that wasn't right. Yeah. Um, and they knew that if it was somewhere that rejecting of someone, just based on this one element of their identity, that it was not safe. So it was a, you know, a challenging, there was a lot of edges there. I, I'm very grateful [00:14:00] to have, you know, over time parents who've become very accepting, understanding, but we struggled in our own right as well to kind like find a common ground, grew up conservative and religious.

And when I got through college, I was like, I need to get out of the south. I need to move and, and grow somewhere else. And so, uh, moved to Los Angeles where relevant to our, you know, your work. I, I worked in the film industry, was actually my first job. I studied film and finance in school and moved to LA to be a film producer.

Worked for one for a couple years and that was not, I guess, what I expected. I ended up having a great experience and learning a lot, but it just was, it was a, a career trial that just did not end up being where I wanted to be ultimately.

Julie Harris Oliver: So, you know, I always joke that, um, people like dream their whole lives about getting into the entertainment industry and then as soon as they're in, they're trying to figure out how to get out.

Blake Mitchell: I mean, that's how it felt a little bit. Yeah, I would be very open, I think, with some time and space to be. More plugged in and tapped back in in different ways, but I think at the time it was like also just the shock of going from what I just explained to Los [00:15:00] Angeles and living in that. And I was like, where on earth did I just move?

It's like, go to the moon, right? I was like, I remember I had just moved to LA and I was walking into work and there was someone in the building, not in my company, but at somewhere else, and I opened the door. Southern, you're always open the door, hold the door for someone when they go through. And this woman looked at me and scouted and she said, you chauvinistic pig.

I don't need you to hold the door for me. Fuck off. And then walked into the building and I was like, oh no, I'm just trying to be nice. This like nice southern kid.

Julie Harris Oliver: Many of us have been guilty of that over rotation. Yeah, me in my twenties, I apologize to everybody.

Blake Mitchell: No, I mean, I don't know what sort of day she was having or what that triggered, so legitimate response.

But for me I was just like, I dunno where I moved. And so some of it was just that, that I think LA was a bit overwhelming and, but learned a lot, had got picked up. A lot of fun stories and. Ultimately to make a long story shorter, uh, wound up moving to San [00:16:00] Francisco, um, after I'd been in LA a couple years to start, uh, what became a nine year career at Google.

Um, I started as a recruiting coordinator doing support work for HR and recruiting functions. And then over the time I was there, moved into doing learning and development work and managed a few teams there for a number of years. That was really my pull to HR was getting to like, Do the training and development and work with folks.

I felt like that felt like a really meaningful way to connect with folks in a corporate environment and you know, had always sort of been tangent to d e I work and there was a lot that we were doing in the training space also. Really, I was working on hiring programs there and of course a lot of work to do in, in equity and hiring.

And really felt drawn to that. And so, uh, that led me to my last couple years at the organization where I led a couple teams and Google Central Diversity and Inclusion team, uh, largely centered around, uh, retention and progression of underrepresented populations in tech. But also doing a lot of like organizational diagnostic work with leaders at YouTube and Google Cloud and Google Marketing, and really helping them understand [00:17:00] the landscape of their employee population, where there are gaps and where they could make changes or stage interventions to, I mean, one, retain people, but just make their organization more equitable and inclusive.

So, um, right. Learned a a lot in that space. And that's, you know, My current chapter of doing HR consulting, which we can get into, but I'll, I'll just say in the background of all of that, while I was in San Francisco, there was this whole personal transformation going on when Mary Lou Pearl and my drag was beginning because I, I joke that I never like saw drag on television.

It was like, I want to do that. That's the thing. How do I do that? It was just this like slow progression where I moved to San Francisco, which. As many know as a very historically like queer city, there's a lot of queer life and gay liberation movement. A lot was happening there simultaneously when Stonewall was happening in New York.

And so it has that legacy. And I, I moved and made friends with a much more queer circle and started to like go out wearing makeup and heels and met drag queens for the first time and was, [00:18:00] you know, like, I don't think I'm really into this, or I don't know if I even wanna watch these shows, which. Had this like deconstructing process that needed to happen from my upbringing of like what it means to be an L G B T person.

What gender and gender expression looks like, what's normal behavior and what I wanted, right. I these, yeah. Things that were tied up in that and I, you know, when I came out, one of the messages that I got from my family, um, Was like ultimately it's okay to be gay, but don't be quote that gay that's over the top, throwing it in someone's face, marching in the parades, wearing women's clothes.

These are the verbatim things that. Which now we joke about because I'm like, well, I did all of that. Mm-hmm. So I, I did exactly what I was told not to.

Julie Harris Oliver: You can be gay just don't be yourself at all.

Blake Mitchell: Right? Yeah. And don't make it. And it should never make anyone else uncomfortable, right? Yeah. Just it, it, which is the primary thing, which I thankfully unpacked and moved on from over time, but that was still stuck [00:19:00] in my brain.

And so I think when I, I got to San Francisco and realized like, oh. Community of people who, many of them have left those places back home and said, I'm not living that way. I'm living. For me, it took me some time to sort of de thaw, I would say, but as I did, I just revealed this beautiful part of me that I still am, you know, I feel like exploring and learning, and I'm so grateful that happened because I, I joke that I think Mary Lou Pearl was always there.

She's not some different entity. She's an extension of Blake. It's just that. She was so repressed and pushed down because of where I grew up, that coming to a place like SF really allowed that to come out. And you know, it, it's been a beautiful journey. I started performing in 2017 again, like I. Got to know drag performers in San Francisco and the Queen who became my, what we call drag mother.

So you're like sort of adopted, uh, drag parent who teaches you how to do it and gets you booked and all of that. Uh, Suga is her name and she taught me the ropes and got me [00:20:00] started and I thought, okay, well maybe I'll try once doing a show in this little dive bar. No one will ever see it. It'll be funny and a fun story.

And then I performed. Every month, multi times a month for the next four years until the pandemic hit. So it just sort of like became this thing that, you know, over time became such a critical part of my experience at the city. And you know, and along the way I was, as I was mentioning, learned so much about my own gender and gender expression.

And I think ultimately that sort of crack was the crack in the foundation that allowed me to explore my identity as a non-binary person as well. But, It's been a really cool journey and I would say, I mean, we can get more into sort of like what I'm up to these days, but I would say, you know, as I progressed, uh, a friend said something to me that really resonated, which was, it's amazing if, if performing is your focus and that's what you want.

It's just like the element of being on stage and entertaining people. But there's an opportunity when you have the spotlight on you, whether it be on stage or online to say something that matters and, and talk about things that [00:21:00] matter. And I think that. Really stuck with me and has challenged me as I've, you know, sort of grown over time and grown my online presence to really try to, as we said at the top of the call, like speak truth to power and speak truth to some of these things that are being so misconstrued these days, especially as it relates to young queer people who I think often.

Getting the, having some of the toughest time cuz they don't have the agency to always like, navigate out of the situation they're in. Um, and or feeling a lot of hopelessness. So that has really sort of pushed me to continue this work in different ways over the years.

Julie Harris Oliver: How did you come to the name Mary Lou Pearl?

Blake Mitchell: It's an amalgamation of a few things. I, um, many drag performers have like a punny name that has some secondary, you know, as an entendre of entendre,

Julie Harris Oliver: like Rhonda Sandis,

Blake Mitchell: Rhonda San. Yeah, exactly. There's so many. Also for anyone listening, if you haven't, uh, discovered the Instagram page, Republicans, which is a site that makes drag queens out of like the likeness of conservative [00:22:00] politicians using ai.

It's hysterical. And their names like that. It'll be like Rhonda Santis or something like that. So it's a fun little thing to look up, um, after this. But Mary Lou was my neighbor growing up next door, neighbor, and. Southern woman who helped care for me when I was little. My mom's name is also Mary, so there was like a sort of a double tie in there.

And I, I loved the southern name of like a, you know, Mary Beth, Mary Lou, Sarah Ann, like whatever. Felt very southern. And then my dad's mom who grew up in central Mississippi. She always wore this strand of pearls that now my mom has inherited. And my sister and I fight over who gets it, but I tell her they're mine because I literally named my drag persona after them.

Um, but those like pearls were just like so important to gran. And she, having grown up very, very poor without a lot of means, like it meant a lot to her that when she was able to afford and she wore them every day. And so I said that together one time. Mary Lou Pearl, I was just like running through names with a friend and I was like, that's it, that's it, that's it.

And I [00:23:00] don't know why it clicked. That's, that's it.

Julie Harris Oliver: Now let's talk about the different types of drag performance. Like I imagine the drag performance that happens in a bar may be different from a drag queen story time in a library.

Blake Mitchell: Absolutely. Yeah. It's a super important distinction I think for a lot of the conversation happening today, because I think.

Very often folks attacking drag performers will pull up these, you know, clips from a drag performance in the club and say, see, this is not something that kids should ever be looking at. And many of them it's not. That's why they're at an 18 or 21 and up club. Right? Yeah. And it was an adult, for an adult audience, very much that you wouldn't take your kids always to an R rated or NC 17 film, right?

They're for a specific audience in a time and place. And so many of those club performances are a bit more crass. They're, you know, Very often dance lip sync based, sometimes comedy hosting, kind of a burlesque feel to some of them as well, if you've been to a burlesque show. But on the flip side is like when there are performances or events [00:24:00] with kids, like the drag queen story hours, which I've done in the past as well, it's just.

Someone in a costume reading a book to kids and relating to them. And to be honest, kids, like even little kids who don't really have strong language skills, just immediately light up when they see a drag performer cuz the makeup is big and the costume is big. And it's, I, I realized one time a friend was like, will you look sort of like a cartoon character?

Or like, yeah, I was gonna say right, because you're just so overblown and the hair is big and their sequence, it's just like over. And so they sort of. Doe-eyed and like, kind of a little like, you know, overwhelmed by all of it, but, you know, it's, it's fun and playful. And I did some virtual, uh, drag queen story hours during the pandemic for parents who had their kids at home.

Uh, when I was working at Google, I would take part of the day and sign on and drag and, and Googlers would bring their kids on to just like have a moment to see and I would read and they'd go into the kitchen and be doing something in the background while the kids like glue to the computer screen watching.

It's very innocent and. I also do at [00:25:00] the, I work at an L G B T summer camp in the summertime where there's direct programming and that also is very tailored for a more junior audience where it's all about like, if kids want to and choose to opt in and participate, then they, you know, can come and just say like, Hey, heres some different ways you could like, put on makeup or try that, or if you wanna try on costumes that's here, and then we'll, you know, let you kind of like show off to the other people.

It's, it's honestly like, you know, when I was a kid, we would go play. Dress up or something and play games or something in that way, it's not too different. It's just that for them, especially for young queer people who are exploring maybe their own identity, there's an element of like feeling out what feels good or right to them.

But yeah, to your, you know, original question. All of it is scaled to the audience, much like film or television would be too, right? We put ratings and have specific spaces where people access and others don't, and the club drag shows are not what is happening with young people. Now,

Julie Harris Oliver: I know a lot of the language right now is that drag is grooming and that if you're doing it at a summer camp for [00:26:00] children, I can see people saying that that is definitely grooming Well, how would you respond to that before I start launching into statistics of who's actually grooming in this world?

Go ahead.

Blake Mitchell: Yeah. Well, I'll leave the stats to you then. I was gonna start there, but I, you know, we, no

Julie Harris Oliver: do, I don't have them. I just, yeah. I just know it's, you know, straight white guys and clergy doing the grooming.

Blake Mitchell: Exactly. That's the short of it is like when you look at statistics of what's actually happening.

It is, and not to, uh, and by any means, to mean anyone in a religious position of power. But that is often, those are often the people, sports coaches, uh, who are taking advantage of their position of power because it's not like, A drag queen who meets a kid at a story hour is all of a sudden convincing them that they should be queer, act a certain way, like for really talking about what grooming is.

It's, it's. There's like a built relationship and trust that then it's like, you know, over time you're like tricking or bringing someone in and that's just not, there's no evidence that that's happening at any sort of significant number with drag performers or group people, [00:27:00] and it's absolutely not what is, what is happening at this camp.

I mean, if we think about the kids that we interact with and that I get to work with there, number one, their parents or families or caregivers have opted for them to go to an L G B T summer camp and either they come on a scholarship or they've paid, they've brought them there and dropped them off. Once they have arrived, they have a huge array of activities they can choose to participate in.

So drag is one of them, but they could also go hiking. They could do swimming, they could do poetry or ukulele. We have a puppetry class. Like there's just all sorts of things. They're fun that they could participate in. I

Julie Harris Oliver: would think it's mostly about they can go to camp and feel safe.

Blake Mitchell: Exactly, and it's, it's a space where they don't have to explain themselves or question or feel like they have to be in defense mode.

They can just be themself. And for some of them, they want to come check out drag. And so if they make it, make their way to my workshop, start off and talk through history, cultural context, what it looks like, different examples of drag, and then it's kind of like, what do you wanna make of it? For some of them, they try on the heels or they try putting on [00:28:00] makeup and they're like, Nope, that's not for me, or I don't wanna be on stage.

And so then we're like, well, you can help with lights, you could do tech, you could, you know, just help me with the logistical piece and be behind the scenes. And that's great for the kids who do choose to do it. It's about them sort of exploring what works for them. And I think what's so sad about the narrative is like, to your point, it's very often like, Oh, queer people and drag performers are using this to trick and they want to groom young people and and convince them to be queer in some way.

And actually, yeah. What's really happening is there are kids who are, yeah. Can you do that number one? No. But also like, what it really is, is it's young people who are dealing with a really, really tough world right now where it's hard for them to just exist and just to be themselves coming somewhere where they feel.

Fully affirmed and supported and getting to just play and explore with no judgment, right? It's like getting to try stuff on and say, this feels good, or this doesn't, or just feel free and not have to contort themselves into like their, you know, these [00:29:00] environments that don't fit for them back home. And seeing the joy and affirmation that that brings to them is so, Beautiful.

I mean, I had one, uh, one of my campers who I'll say was a bit of a, a tough one at times to work with, and they were always never quite prepared. Last minute, everything in like the day of the final performance. They came to me and were like, Blake, I need help with my makeup. They were addressing up as a drag king, and they're like, can you put on some like makeup to give me like a fake beard or something?

And I was like, well, we're, we're like literally walking out the door, but gimme, yeah, two minutes. I'll do what I can. I put it on, give them the mirror and they just start sobbing immediately. I was like, oh no, like what now? Like what's happening? And they just said, Just seeing myself with this facial hair and the makeup and like, I feel I've never felt more like right in my own body.

Like this feels so affirming and I just thank you for like doing that. And so it's about not trying to con like make them something they're not. It's allowing them the space to be what they already are, but [00:30:00] their home environment doesn't always allow. So it is sad that it, it's so misconstrued, but drag truly is such a beautiful, I think, tool for folks to just.

Play and have fun and explore themselves if they want to. But again, no one's forcing them to do that.

Julie Harris Oliver: I think the thing that probably needs to gain acceptance is the kids are already L G B, lgbtq. Yeah. And you can't do anything to make them that way.

Blake Mitchell: Absolutely. Yeah. It's not that. I mean, and you see over and over how much people, when their kids come out, try to change them or make them different and.

What that typically does is it just pushes them away or they have to run off to become themselves, or they, you know, are just unhappy. But there's not like anything that is done to them at a certain point that's like triggering this. It's, it's not about them like being indoctrinated, it's just them coming into who they're meant to be.

Julie Harris Oliver: Would you say you have known any adults who had the agenda of making kids gay?

Blake Mitchell: No. I mean, the, it just, it, it honestly [00:31:00] sounds wild to even think about. I, I joke that like straight people seem to be doing a well enough job of producing gay people. I don't need to go create more somehow recruiting, recruit anybody.

Like they, we keep showing up in straight families. So does that happen? There's many, yeah. And of course there's many, I don't mean to say that's the only way that kids come to be. Right. There's many different ways. Through the joy, the incredible progress and like fertility treatment and things like that that kids can be born or adopted.

But I all that to say like we've always been here and I think another like misnomer that has come up is like, well, all this queer identity is just a fab. Like all of a sudden so many people are saying they're trans and non-binary or. Use they them pronouns and like that this wasn't the case. Like you all are just, this is a fat, like a Gen Z fat that you're all hopping onto.

And it's like that's nonsense. Like we've seen over, over time at Ebb and Flow how out people are given the society and the context. But you know, through many different civilizations and cultures. In the Western world and the eastern world, like there have been queer people, and to [00:32:00] be honest, you know, in indigenous culture and especially in the East, non-binary and trans people were revered often in, in the cultures that the indigenous people in the United States called it Two-Spirit is what they, what we would call non-binary like folks that held both gender.

You know, men and women together and were more powerful cause of that. But because society had started to shift, I think in a more progressive way with marriage equality, passing and more progress in terms of legislation, we, I think we saw the condition shift and so more people started, have started to come out and be more public.

And feel like they can be themselves. And I think that's why the backlash happens again. It's like we make progress. People start to see the power and the progress and get scared or freaked out and it whips the other direction. But it's not like it's new. We've always been here. It's just, it's changed in terms of us feeling like there's more space for us to, to be out and be ourselves and have language around what that, what that means.

Julie Harris Oliver: Should we talk a little bit about the legislation sweep in the country?

Blake Mitchell: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. As part of my consulting work, I, uh, get asked to [00:33:00] review different corporations copy and things, especially around Pride Month from an LGBTQ perspective. And I was editing something today, uh, this morning that was, uh, talking about, I think it was an article from February that said A C L U saying 120 anti L G B T bills have been introduced across the us.

And I was like, I'm nervous to look up the current number, but I need to correct this. And so I did. And it's five now, just in the last six. 500 this legislative session in the United States. And

Julie Harris Oliver: why? Like why? I just like what's it to ya?

Blake Mitchell: I mean, I'm not a political analyst, but I will say from my perspective and um, did work on the last midterm election in Atlanta and I, you know, my perception is that the right optin uses these friend issues around identity and sort of this guys thing of like protecting tradition and family as a way to rally a more like, Radical conservative base, um, and distract from the real issues I think that are [00:34:00] impacting people today.

And so we hear all this rhetoric that we've talked a lot about already about threat to children of drag performers and them being indoctrinated. But we all know the statistics or maybe we don't, but we started to hear now the real number one thing that's killing children in the United States is gun violence.

But they don't wanna talk about that or make any changes to protect kids.

Julie Harris Oliver: That John Stewart clip was very powerful. Go look that up.

Blake Mitchell: Exactly. If you haven't, that is a, it's give you some good talking points if you get in a discussion with, uh, people about this. But that is the number one threat to kids in the United States right now is gun violence and shootings and schools and communities, but, Because I think of gun lobbies and NRA and other institutions, they're not making change there, so they need to distract people and pick somewhere else.

I think for a while in politics we, there was Roe v. Wade was, uh, overturned or, or rolled back and, uh, maybe abortion wasn't an issue that they thought in the midterms would be more polarizing or, or might galvanized people in a bigger way. It didn't, in many ways, for them it actually is like many people, [00:35:00] Most people, the majority are opposed to it being overturned.

And so I think their focus had to, they had something else. I mean, it's a's. Republicans for decades and decades of weaponizing identity. We saw it all the way back to like the war on drugs and these sort of guys like racial undertones that got people afraid of crime in cities and, and, and voting in certain ways.

And I think unfortunately, the current target is queer people, and I would say largely transgender people, transgender kids. And then drag queens as an extension of that. And because I think most people, many people don't know, can't make the distinctions that we made in this call. And so it's just this sort of unknown thing that feels scary and they've tried to equate to being a threat to a traditional family when there's no threat.

We're not coming after anybody. We're just trying to exist. Right? Yeah. Trying to live, I want, I want these kids to grow up, period. And we, period. That's it. Like just to have, be happy, healthy, and live because. There's so much, so many issues with mental health and self-harm of, of [00:36:00] queer youth who feel hopeless.

And we've seen that spike even more in the statistics that like the organizations like the Trevor Project put together around mental health and queer youth. And it's just devastating that these political tactics, they're not only misguided and, but they're harming people actively. And hopefully we, we get enough critical, massive understanding and progress that.

That moves on, but it's just sick that that continues to be a tactic and that it harms so many people across different communities right now, the LGBT community over time as that happens. There was,

Julie Harris Oliver: I saw yesterday, I wish I remembered her name or her position, but she was speaking about cuz here in Los Los Angeles, north Hollywood School was going to do an assembly about pride and protesters showed up.

Someone, uh, I think they put their trans teacher on leave, like all kinds of shenanigans. And an administrator in that school gave a speech that was so powerful and so beautiful and made me think like, okay, PE people are in charge, who are gonna be able to handle this? And she was like, all of the [00:37:00] shenanigans surrounding this, you've just made, all the queer kids in this school know that they're not safe here.

Like good job. The whole talk is about protecting the children and saving the children and it, and, and in fact, it's doing the opposite, making people feel unsafe.

Blake Mitchell: Yeah. With many of these topics and issues, like, it again is framed as like wanting to help children or protect them, but to your point, it just makes them feel less safe or question their space in society or if they even are welcome and so it actually is harming them as the ultimate outcome.

To kind of tie together a couple threads of what we were talking about. I think those protests of these events and the threats and the legislation and all of that are disheartening and, and discouraging. But I think like the ultimate outcome is they do want to silence us or intimidate us into not living existing doing the things that we need to do.

And honestly, it, it really just galvanizes me to push harder, I think, and continue to find ways to support young, queer people, um, and can continue the work of the nonprofit, the. Lgt Summer can't break trails that I work with because, you know, at the end of the day, like I've said a [00:38:00] few minutes ago, just, I just want these kids to be able to grow up and know that they're loved and supported.

And there's so many messages to the contrary right now that I think we have to work double time to make sure they hear the truth and also

Julie Harris Oliver: that they can have happy lives and they can have families and they can have all the things that straight people have.

Blake Mitchell: Exactly. Yeah. I, I mean, I remember I came out first as gay when I was 15.

And I remember thinking like, well, I'm choosing at this point to, yeah, not have a family, never get married, you know, not be able to be a part of the church. Like all these things. And I, I just over time seeing how like, this is not some like, foreclosing on any sort of life. Like of course we get to choose.

What we want. And maybe some of those things don't fit for us, but like if you want all of that, you can have it. It's just, it's just who you love or how you identify in your skin, right? But people I think want you to believe that it's some sort of like death sentence if you're come out as queer and that your life's gonna be terrible and.

It's not. And if it is, it's probably because they're making it that way, not cause it has anything to do with actually identifying that way.

Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah. And I, I think [00:39:00] that's probably really hard to see if you are, you know, brought up in a community where everyone you're surrounded with, you know, that's the norms of your dominant culture.

Absolutely. What are some other myths that are important for us to unpack?

Blake Mitchell: I guess for parents to, sometimes they feel like they did something wrong or this was like a, a result of, I remember all these messages about like, well, maybe you know, someone's dad is too absent or mom is overbearing, and then you, you know, whatever thing, like somehow that influenced sexual orientation or gender identity.

And again, it's just like who someone is. Right? I think also that, you know, one thing that can maybe is less of a like misunderstanding, but just something that I would, I felt sometimes and would raise is like, I think it feels hopeless sometimes to do anything because this has been so sweeping and overwhelming at the rate at which, you know, these laws are passed and things have like come to be, um, that it just feels like there's nothing we can do.

And I think that. We all have to play [00:40:00] our small part. And so for some people that's going down to their capital and protesting and being very present in an agitator in a real way. Not everyone can do that or feel safe too. So it's also just like educating yourself on these issues and understanding how you can support the l g BT people in your life.

It's. Speaking with your vote and voting for people and local elections especially who are going to like defend and protect and donating. Like there's just so many different like ways I think to challenge things that it's not hopeless that like we see over time. There are these sort of like moments of where we sort of take a couple steps back and there's a lot of pushback when.

There's been progress, but I think the arc of, you know, justices long MLK used to say, and we need to be thoughtful that like we just have to continue to work and push and it's not dire by any means. It's just a tough moment.

Julie Harris Oliver: Yes. It was striking to me just watching these legislative sessions and so many people telling their stories and telling the nuance and telling how these, how these bills [00:41:00] would be harmful and.

In the face of all that evidence, still passing the bills, like it's so unfathomable to me and, and yet it's really happening.

Blake Mitchell: Another misunderstanding sometimes that people have around like queer trans identity that I think is important when we're talking about queer youth and legislation to raise is that many people and many of the, a lot of the rhetoric that the right has pushed is that surgeons are doing procedures and like.

Gender surgeries on like young children, which is not true, and they're by and large. If a kid is undergoing gender affirming care from a physician, it's largely hormone blockers, which just slows puberty while they figure out how they identify or what feels right to them, which is all reversible. There's sometimes, if it's taken at certain developmental stages that.

It can be some nuance, but I would say in general, like you can stop taking it and just continue to progress, you know, as in whatever way your body is going. But it also allows for time for families to slow down and say like, okay, you may be thinking about this, but let's take [00:42:00] some time to consider. And then if in a few years we're sure that you do wanna like start to socially transition or transition through medical care once you're.

Of an appropriate age, you can start to take, um, H r T or hormone replacement therapy and then down the road, once folks are older, perhaps undergo gender affirming surgery. But I think there's this like idea and, and my dad, who's a physician also asked me, like, with the camp, like, can you help me understand, like I'm, I'm reading or I, I'm seeing things about like the surgeries happening on young kids and that that is, uh, really, really not true.

There are even laws being passed in states. To ban that when it's not happening. Like there's no medical professional conducting those procedures for enough kids under 18. And so it's like this again, is not actually changing anything that's actually going on in practice. It's just a tactic and, and by and large, like when kids are undergoing that, it much more nuanced.

And I guess I would just like into that thought was saying that like all the major medical organizations and collections of physicians in the United States, Agree that that [00:43:00] type of care is appropriate and despite that laws continuing to be passed, blocking it and restricting parents for making these decisions for their own families with healthcare providers in a way that works for them, which is just so frustrating to see when the actual people who know and done their research say like, we should be allowing families to make these decisions with for themselves.

Julie Harris Oliver: Yeah, and I don't know how you get to be, especially right now my age and not know many people with trans children and just. No one is rushing into treatment. No. I mean, everybody is rushing into, let's understand it, let's evaluate it. Let's make sure we're getting the best possible care for my child. No one is just first of all, talking their kid into changing their gender and then secondly, doing radical things to make it happen.

It's, it's just not a thing, and it's the same. I mean, it's the same legislators who are trying to, trying to do reproductive health. I mean, it's, mm-hmm. It's absurd. It's absurd. It's the same people who are talking about post-birth abortion. It's

Blake Mitchell: nonsense. Right. [00:44:00] That's not happening. None of it's based in truth or fact.

Yeah. Uh, there are very little of It is right. Again, it's just a scare tactic. Now

Julie Harris Oliver: going back to the drag of it all, I wanted to rewind 45 minutes and you talked about your, was it drag mother? Was that the term? Mm-hmm. Showing you the ropes. I'm curious. Yeah. What are the ropes?

Blake Mitchell: Well, it's, Dolly Parton says it costs a lot to look this cheap.

It takes a while, a lot of work to get into the look. Um, which is always funny for people when they're like around me when I'm. In process, but I would say foundationally, it's like the makeup technique and how to use different makeup to reshape your face and, and create the illusion or the look that you want on top of that, in terms of like just the physical transformation, it's costuming.

Very often, uh, people are using hip pads, breast plates, cinching here, tucking a bit here, cinching here. Just sort of like. However, you're sort of adapting to like look a bit different or, or usually build this like bigger than life personality, right? That kinda accentuating different things. And so all of [00:45:00] that is something that's usually taught or people like can show you how to do.

And then from there it's like how do you, if you don't know how to edit music, how do you edit the musical track? How do you like what? How does, what does the choreography look like? How do you get booked at a different clever bar? Um, who are the people in town to get to know, like all those little things, the tricks of the trade that you pick as you go, um, is something you would typically like tap your drag mom to ask about.

Julie Harris Oliver: And is it mostly performing as, you know, music artists?

Blake Mitchell: I would say yeah. A lot of people do impersonation. Some people like pick a persona and like sort of do his, that I, um, a lot of mine. Like classic divas. I'm a big share fan. I love country music. I've done Dolly Drag, I've done Shania Twain Drag, uh, with like the leopard print look from the, that don't impress me much video if folks are country fans like me and know that iconic look, that was like a childhood favorite that I got to recreate.

So it depends. But yeah, very often it's doing like lip sync to different artists and sort of like paying homage to them.

Julie Harris Oliver: And we talked a little bit [00:46:00] before we were doing this podcast about how, you know, you really came into your own in San Francisco and Los Angeles and, but you've been returning to the South and thinking about making your home there knowing that you could make more of a difference there.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Blake Mitchell: Yeah, so at the point where I felt like ready for my chapter at Google to wrap as I was sort of considering next steps, you know, I think often the universe gives us little like. Signals or nudges. And I, um, I remember sort of having this thought and then the same day I opened Instagram and Stacey Abrams announced that she was running it for governor in Georgia again.

And I've been a longtime follower and fan of hers and her work in the south and in around voting rights and access, and I thought, Dang. Wouldn't that be a cool thing to do if I left Google? Yeah. And lo and behold, a year later, uh, I was in the throes of things working on that campaign and in Georgia, many steps to get there and a lot of help from people.

But yeah.

Julie Harris Oliver: How do you get a job on a campaign? [00:47:00]

Blake Mitchell: Oh, you, you hustle everyone in your network trying to find a way in. I guess. I ultimately, I had a friend who after school, had gone to work for Elizabeth Warren and then was working for Raphael Warnock, the senator from Georgia, who just was reelected. Thank goodness.

Thank goodness. Oh my word. What a cliffhanger that was. But he, he, I talked with his, that campaign a bit and then he connected me, um, as well with Stacy's campaign. But it ended up being through the random way of like, network. A friend from San Francisco went to college with her chief of staff and so, um, I got linked up.

But to be honest, I talked to them months before I moved back. But they were like, great, you seem great. We'd love to work with you, but like, We're not, we only hire when you can start, like right now because everything changes, you know, immediately. So reach out when you're moving back. And, um, I did a couple weeks before I decided to just go back to Georgia regardless and figure it out when I got there.

And I ended up signing an offer five days before I moved. So it was through, you know, some [00:48:00] friends who were tapped into that world. And again, I would've come back and like scrubbed the floors in the headquarters if they wanted me to, or like volunteered. Like I was just wanting to be involved. Any, anything from Stacy Abrams?

Literally anything like I would, would've done anything. I'm really grateful I got to, I ended up doing an operations role for her field team and doing a lot of the LGBT outreach and planning around Pride in Atlanta, which happens in October. So it was an amazing experience, but. That was sort of my first feeling of like, hey, there's some really cool things happening in the south and a lot of progress in Georgia has become really a hot button political state in terms of it's, you know, become truly purple in terms of the electorate and changed pretty quickly.

I think a lot of due to the work I think that Stacy and team have done to get more people registered and involved in the process. But you know, I thought at first I would go and then move back to California and when I got back I. You know, with some time to sort of decompress despite the, her loss was really interested in, okay, there's a lot happening here and I [00:49:00] feel ready at a place in, you know, of feeling steady and good in my own identity and where I'm at to sort of return and try and be a part of that.

And I feel, you know, particularly drawn to supporting queer communities, but I think there's many different. Causes and things that are happening right now that are really interesting. And so I've, you know, made the decision to move back to Georgia and be there permanently. And in working with the summer camp that I've been at Brave Trails to help with some expansion to the South in the coming years and hopefully be a small part of this progress, um, happening in the South.

And I think. Georgia does provide an interesting opportunity because legislatively has not been as tough for queer people. It provides a bit of a, a haven, and Atlanta certainly is a very progressive city with a lot of queer people living there and a lot of like, support from bigger like corporate organizations.

So I'm really excited. Um, I was nervous given what I shared about my upbringing, about going back. Yeah. Um, and my therapist said something to me that I will never, ever forget as I was thinking about it. He said, you are not the same person that you were when you left. Georgia is not the same [00:50:00] state that it was when you left.

And so go reintroduce yourself and see how it feels and maybe you'll be surprised. And I was, and um, I'm really. Excited to grow there in this next chapter, to be there and, you know, honestly, just to get to know the already incredible people on the ground doing work. And it's been really neat to see all the organizations that already exist, both in, in and outta the political sphere.

And there's actually a really beautiful overlap between the activists and nonprofit community and drag performers there who I've gotten to know because so many of us are tapped in different ways and are in the ways we wanna support our, our community. So I'm excited, excited about this next chapter.

Julie Harris Oliver: I'm excited for you. And there was a time when, cause you know, so much of Hollywood has gone there and there's so much production work there. It's really become like the second hub. Mm-hmm. I'm sure there are times of the year where it's the first hub, but when, uh, I think it was the bathroom laws came down, That, that was Georgia, right?

Yep. And Hollywood is really talking about, do we pull out of Georgia? You know, it's, it's [00:51:00] not, it's not safe for people and we don't agree with all that. And Stacey Abras herself made a plea to a lot of the companies saying, please don't pull your money out. There's so many people here that still that need your help, that need your votes.

My understanding is she made a really personal plea to have the Hollywood studios not pull out and try to help on the ground. So it sounds like perhaps some of that is happening.

Blake Mitchell: Absolutely. Yeah, I remember that actually. And I, I remember thinking like, you know, I was still in California at the time, being like, wow, Georgia's such a complicated place and sometimes embarrassing.

We think we've made it forward and stuff like this will happen. But it is actually really, I think, uh, beneficial to progress that there are, um, Like a lot of, you know, Hollywood organizations and folks doing film production there and a lot of money, obviously a lot of also big corporations that have sway in terms of like, hey, you know, the Deltas and Coca-Colas and companies like that, that have been there a long time, that have like a bit of an influence.

Um, but I think Stacy's point is, was really [00:52:00] good and true and that. You know, there is this shift happening where the folks who've controlled, you know, the libras of power in Georgia and the South are slowly getting, I think, sort of phased out. And I think they're gripping even tighter and doing things to try and disenfranchise people and keep them out because they see the electorate shifting.

And I think to her point, there's a whole new generation of people stepping in. And there's also folks who've just never felt like they had a place in the system and the electric electoral like system and, and their voices didn't matter who. She and others have really like re enfranchised and helped them to understand like it does matter.

And if we all show up in, in collective, we can elect two democratic senators, uh, and send them to DC from Georgia and, and, and have that influence and flip the Senate as we did in 20. I think that's really re-energized folks to see that they do have a part to play. But certainly, yeah, having, uh, many of our LA friends kind of relocating out to Georgia certainly has helped with that progressive influence.

Julie Harris Oliver: Well, I wanna start a campaign and I can't remember if I've said this on the podcast before or not, but go home to vote. Yeah. [00:53:00] If everyone from the cities went back to where they came from vote, how different would our electoral map look?

Blake Mitchell: Yeah. I had this conversation this morning with a friend. We went on a a little hike and we were saying like, so many of us flee the place we grew up cuz we don't feel like we fit there.

And there's often this arc that I feel like I'm in right now where we then return. Once we feel like we've done the work and growing that we need to, to then be a part of like trying to move it forward and give back maybe.

I think you're right there. You know, there's so much, there's, uh, I, I don't fault anybody for going to a more progressive place or being on the coast cause I did it right. And I, it was really, really transformative to me as I shared in our time today. But I think like when you can, if you can, there's so much opportunity and these places, I, you know, I don't want to be misunderstood.

They don't need to be saved. Right. We don't need to go back and save these communities. Like, there's a lot of really incredible resilient people who've been on the ground for decades fighting the fight day in and day out. But they need support. They need resources. They need more of us to show [00:54:00] up. And so I think even if it's from afar, we can think of how to continue to.

Support that work and, and support small organizations doing it on the ground. I think the big groups like A C L U and Trevor Project and these big national, um, H R C like groups are really important, but they are also pretty well funded. Often I think finding the small grassroots groups that are on the ground doing it and, and providing support in real time are so important because they're really helping impact.

One on one and any way we can and give that back to the places that we grew up and help people who are less fortunate than ourselves, I think is always really, really good.

Julie Harris Oliver: And I think it takes, what I'm hearing from you is really your journey of coming from a place of really being oppressed to standing in your own power and, and knowing who you are and knowing what, what you can bring.

And you're not, I think as a person, you're probably not as vulnerable to what that church thinks, you know?

Blake Mitchell: Yeah, exactly. And you know, there is so much [00:55:00] privilege in my story of being able to get out and go somewhere else and find an environment that felt supportive and affirming to me. I know not others can do that, but with that I certainly feel a push.

And for me, I would say probably a personal obligation to then find a way to like pay that forward. You know, my chosen way right now is to try and uplift and support young, queer people and, um, you know, as I mentioned, also help out in the electoral process. I. Yeah, I think like coming back I'm like, I know who I am now.

Like I was definitely less sure and scared and uncertain at that time when those messages were being portrayed, but I don't feel like those people have power over me anymore. And alternatively, like I feel able to sort of cut through that noise and get to others who maybe need to hear a different perspective as well, who may be hearing a lot of the same things that I did and are just like unsure how to progress or what future they can even have.

I mean, this is the work, right? Yes. And it's, it can be exhausting, but also very energizing. And I think sometimes when it feels so [00:56:00] overwhelming and big and like, how do we tackle this behemoth of law that are being introduced? I think I, you know, if I enc, I encourage my team on the campaign and I encourage friends, or even people I work with at the camp, like just think about each day.

How you can show up for the people in your day-to-day life and make a difference for them. Be kind, you know, and, and pass on, you know, good things in that way cuz that that often is all, all we have control over it, but it makes a difference.

Julie Harris Oliver: That feels like a good place to stop. Blake Mitchell, thank you so much for being on the other 50%.

Blake Mitchell: Thank you so much for having me.

Julie Harris Oliver: You have been listening to the other 50% A Herstory of Hollywood. I'm Julie Harris Oliver, thank you to Blake Mitchell for the conversation and for sharing their story. Go look at Mary Lou Pearl's Instagram if you want a treat. There is the sweetest video of Mary Lou Pearl dressing Blake's father in drag, and it is beautiful to witness the love and the support of the father.

Special thanks to Jay Rowe, Dani Rosner, [00:57:00] and Alison McQuaid for the music. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcast and rate and leave a review. If you have a company you would like to be a sponsor, please reach out. You can find me in my work at julieharrisoliver.com. If you're looking for simple, yet effective tools to bring to your production or even just want some help in starting to talk about it, gimme a call.

I'd love to work with you. Thanks for listening. See you next time.